A federal appeals court on Friday (April 26) upheld R. Kelly's conviction on child pornography and enticement charges, rejecting his argument that the case against him was filed too late.
Eighteen months after a federal jury in Chicago found Kelly (Robert Sylvester Kelly) guilty, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the 2022 guilty verdict, saying he had been convicted by “a fair jury” and that “not the statute of limitations on saves”.
“For years, Robert Sylvester Kelly molested underage girls. By using a complex scheme to keep the victims quiet, he avoided the consequences for a long time,” the judge said Amy St. Eva wrote for a panel of three judges. “In recent years, however, these crimes have finally caught up with him. But Kelly — interjecting a statute of limitations defense — believes he delayed the charges long enough to avoid them altogether. The statute says otherwise, so we affirm his conviction.”
Friday's ruling upholds one of Kelly's two sexual assault convictions. The other — a September 2021 guilty verdict on racketeering charges brought by federal prosecutors in New York — is currently pending appeal.
Following Friday's decision, Kelly can now appeal the verdict to the US Supreme Court. However, such appeals face extremely high odds, as the high court hears only a small fraction of the petitions it receives.
In a statement to Advertising sign on Friday, Kelly's attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, said: “We are disappointed by the decision, but our fight is far from over. We will seek review by the Supreme Court and continue to pursue all of its remedies until we free R. Kelly. You can bet on it.”
After decades of sexual harassment allegations, Kelly was indicted in 2019 by federal prosecutors in both New York and Illinois. By the end of 2022, he had been convicted on both counts.
In Brooklyn, the feds charged Kelly with violating the federal RICO statute by orchestrating a long-term scheme to recruit and abuse women and underage girls. After being convicted in September 2021, Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In Chicago, a different group of federal prosecutors charged Kelly with violating child pornography laws, luring minors for sex and obstructing justice in a 2008 criminal trial. Although acquitted of some charges, Kelly was sentenced in September 2022 .The judge later sentenced him to 20 years in prison, but the vast majority of that sentence will be served concurrently with the New York sentence.
In appealing the Chicago verdict, Kelly's lawyers argued that the case — for crimes that allegedly occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s — was filed well beyond the then-current statute of limitations. which prohibited charges of child sexual abuse after victim 25u birthday.
But in Friday's ruling, the justices chose to apply the contemporary statute of limitations, which runs throughout the victim's life.
“Kelly argues that the old, pre-2003 statute of limitations should control,” wrote Judge St. Eve. “All of the juvenile solicitation in this case, he points out, was done when he could have expected a more generous statute of limitations. The law does not support Kelly's position.”
The appeals court also rejected several of Kelly's other arguments, including one challenging the procedural fairness of his trial and another challenging the propriety of his sentence.
With Kelly's verdict upheld in Chicago, attention now turns to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which is currently weighing his conviction in Brooklyn. That case was discussed in court last month, when Bonjean told the justices that the RICO case against Kelly had stretched federal racketeering laws “to the point of absurdity.”
