The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by former reality TV star Josh Duggar to overturn his criminal sentence for child pornography.
The Court issued no additional information regarding the order on Monday.
Newsweek reached out to Duggar's attorney, Justin Gelfand, via email for comment.
Duggar, 36, has seven children of his own. He was arrested in May 2021 for allegedly possessing and receiving child pornography. He was convicted on the charges in Arkansas in December of that year, and in May 2022 was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison. He is serving his sentence in Seagoville, Texas.
His current earliest release date is October 2, 2032, which if comes to fruition, will require another 20 years of supervised release while being registered as a sex offender. He will also not be allowed to have any unsupervised contact with minors, including his own children.
Duggar gained national notoriety as one of the children on the former hit TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, which was canceled in 2015 after seven seasons due to the allegations against him.
He married his wife, Anna, in 2008. The pregnancy of the couple's youngest child, Madyson, was announced about one week before Duggar was arrested.
In a petition for a writ of certiorari submitted on February 24, Gelfand requested the Court to look at the trial judge in his client's case—notably for disallowing counsel to mention a prior sex offense conviction by a former dealership employee of Duggar's who purportedly used the same computer. Duggar's counsel never asked that employee to testify due to the judge's ruling.
Gelfand wrote in that petition that Duggar "did not dispute that a crime had been committed, but maintained his innocence and did everything in his power to establish reasonable doubt by demonstrating that a specific alternative perpetrator may have been to blame."
"Courts should trust juries to decide what is, and is not, pure speculation," Gelfand said. "But in this case, it was the judge—not the jury—that made the ultimate decision."
The petition added: "This case presents an important and recurring question that has divided the courts of appeal and that strikes at the heart of the Sixth Amendment: does the exclusion of relevant evidence of an alternative perpetrator based on a trial court's conclusion it is too speculative violate a criminal defendant's constitutional right to present a complete defense?"
In August 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit sided with the trial judge, echoing the Supreme Court in an 11-page rebuttal, writing, "Nothing in the Constitution calls into question 'well-established rules' that 'permit trial judges to exclude evidence if its probative value is outweighed by certain other factors such as unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, or potential to mislead the jury.'"
They agreed with the Arkansas district court, that testimony from the employee in question was done to prevent confusion in that jurors may think that because the individual was registered as a sex offender that he was also responsible for the allegations against Duggar.
In May 2021, days after Duggar's arrest, Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Gerald Faulkner said during a detention hearing that Duggar's computer included multiple files downloaded on three separate days in May 2019—including files allegedly showing children aged 18 months to 12 years old being sexually abused, according to E! News.
Faulkner at the time said the images were "in the top five of the worst of the worst that I've ever had to examine."
Update 06/24/24, 11:17 a.m. ET: This article was updated with more information.
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