Despite it being more than a year since R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years for his Chicago sex crimes against minors, his legal team is still fighting for his freedom.
On Tuesday, the disgraced R&B singer’s legal team filed an appeal to the Supreme Court that argues the crimes he was convicted of fall outside the statute of limitations, according to Rolling Stone.
Specifically, his attorneys are citing the PROTECT Act of 2003, which is a law that says the statute of limitations for sex crimes against children is indefinite. Jennifer Bonjean, Kelly’s attorney, is arguing that her client is serving time for crimes he committed in the 1990s, and since the PROTECT Act was passed in the early 2000s, it should not apply to him.
More from the Rolling Stone:
“Defendant’s charges were time barred,” the petition reads. “Because Congress did not expressly state that the PROTECT Act should apply retroactivity and even rejected a version of the bill that included a retroactive provision, the PROTECT Act did not extend the statute of limitations and Defendant was convicted of time-barred offenses.”
The petition also adds, “Defendant was not charged until more than a decade after the expiration of the statute of limitations under the applicable law at the time of the alleged conduct.”
Just as a reminder, this appeal is only connected to his trial in Chicago, where he was convicted of 13 charges related to the sexual abuse of minors during the 1990s, including counts of coercing minors into sexual activity and counts of producing sex tapes of minors.
Remember, at the time of that conviction, Kelly was in the middle of serving a 30-year prison sentence after he was found guilty of multiple charges in a racketeering and sex trafficking trial in New York back in 2021.
Similarly, his attorneys attempted to appeal the sex trafficking and racketeering charges weeks after he was sentenced but were unsuccessful in that attempt.