Lawyers for R&B singer R. Kelly on Tuesday filed an appeal to the Supreme Court against his federal sex crimes conviction, arguing that the conviction should be thrown out because of the statute of limitations.
Kelly, who is already serving a 30-year sentence for a sex trafficking case in North Carolina in 2021, was also convicted of producing child pornography in 2022 and was serving a concurrent 20-year sentence. Tuesday’s appeal applies to a federal child pornography case being tried in Chicago.
The singer was charged under the PROTECT Act, a 2003 law that extended the federal statute of limitations for sex crimes involving minors. Kelly’s lawyers argued that his acts happened in the 1990s, before the law was passed, so the statute of limitations should have expired.
“The defendant’s complaint has become time-barred,” The application for leave to appeal states:“Because Congress did not expressly state that the PROTECT Act should apply retroactively and rejected bills that even included retroactive provisions, the PROTECT Act did not extend the statute of limitations and defendants were convicted of time-barred crimes.”
Kelly previously appealed the same claims to a lower federal court, but his appeals were rejected by both the district court and the Court of Appeals.
The Supreme Court hears a handful of cases each year, and if it accepts the case, it would hear it in the first session of the Diet in October.
