Even the Supreme Court believes that Josh Duggar's conviction was valid. The former 19 Kids and Counting star’s lawyers are still trying to appeal his 2021 conviction charges related to child sexual abuse materials after his arrest earlier that year. A judge then sentenced him to nearly 13 years in prison, a sentence that he is currently serving at FCI Seagoville in Texas. Over the last two years, his legal team has been busy with the appeals process to try to get his convictions overturned, but they have yet to be successful at the lower court level … and now, they're facing another failure at the federal level.
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The Supreme Court didn't offer any explanation for its appeals denial.
This week, multiple outlets, including political news site The Hill, reported that the Supreme Court denied Josh’s request to consider if his conviction for downloading CSAM images should be thrown out or not. This was his lawyers' latest attempt to appeal after they were denied by the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in October 2023.
Josh's team keeps appealing on the same basis.
In 2019, Homeland Security found the CSAM downloaded onto a computer that Josh used at the car dealership he owned. In the appeal, Josh’s lawyer, Justin Gelfand, proposed that the trial judge had excluded “relevant evidence of an alternative perpetrator” when they barred the defense from asking one of Josh’s employees that also used the computer about a prior sex conviction. After that decision, they chose not to ask the employee to testify.
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His team wasn't willing to back down.
“Mr. Duggar proffered to the district court concrete facts making clear that the potential that the crime had been committed by someone else was far from speculative,” the lawyer declared. “Courts should trust juries to decide what is, and is not, pure speculation. But in this case, it was the judge — not the jury — that made the ultimate decision.”
The lower courts stood by the original conviction.
Josh’s team first filed an appeal in October 2022, requesting that Josh’s conviction be overturned. At the time, they argued that investigators had violated Josh’s rights by seizing the phone he was using to call his lawyer as a part of the search they were conducting that allowed them to find the images. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the trial judge, saying it “struck a balance” by allowing the employee to testify without mentioning the prior convictions.
Josh still has eight years left in prison.
Josh is currently serving his sentence at FCI Seagoville in Texas. In May 2022, he was sentenced to 151 months in prison. Josh was initially scheduled to leave prison in August 2032, but his time was extended by two months after he was caught with a contraband cellphone. He is now slated to be released in October 2032, though that still leaves him serving less time than his original sentence. After his time in prison is served, he will have 20 years of supervised release.
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, the National Sexual Assault Hotline provides confidential 24/7 support. Call 800-656-HOPE (4673) or chat online at RAINN.
