Supreme Court declines appeals from R. Kelly, Martin Shkreli, convicted Texas officer (2025)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected appeals in high-profile cases regarding singer R. Kelly, the social media platform X, Martin Shkreli and a former Texas police officer convicted of killing a woman. Here’s a roundup of the court’s decision in those cases.

R. Kelly

The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal Monday from R. Kelly, who is now serving 20 years in prison after being convicted of child sex convictions in Chicago.

The Grammy Award-winning R&B singer, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, was found guilty in 2022 of three charges of producing child sexual abuse images and three charges of enticement of minors for sex.

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His lawyers argued that a shorter statute of limitations on child sex crime prosecutions should have applied to offenses dating back to the 1990s. Current law permits charges while an accuser is still alive.

The justices did not detail their reasoning in declining to hear the case, as is typical. And none publicly dissented. Lower courts previously rejected his arguments.

Federal prosecutors have said the video showed Kelly abusing a girl. The accuser identified only as Jane testified that she was 14 when the video was taken.

Kelly has also appealed a separate 30-year sentence for federal racketeering and sex trafficking convictions in New York.

Elon Musk’s X platform

The Supreme Court said it won’t hear an appeal from X over a search warrant prosecutors obtained in the election-interference case against former President Donald Trump.

The justices did not explain their reasoning and there were no noted dissents.

The company, known as Twitter before it was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, says a nondisclosure order that blocked it from telling Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.

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The company also argues Trump should have had a chance to exert executive privilege. If not reined in, the government could use similar tactics to invade other privileged communications, their lawyers argued.

Two nonpartisan electronic privacy groups also weighed in, encouraging the high court to take the case on First Amendment grounds.

Prosecutors, though, say the company never showed Trump had used the account for official purposes so executive privilege wouldn’t be an issue. A lower court also found that telling Trump could have jeopardized the ongoing investigation.

Trump used his Twitter account in the weeks leading up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to spread false statements about the election that prosecutors allege were designed to sow mistrust in the democratic process.

The indictment details how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6, pressured his Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification and falsely suggested that the mob at the Capitol — which beat police officers and smashed windows — was peaceful.

That case is now inching forward after the Supreme Court’s ruling in July giving Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.

The warrant arrived at Twitter amid rapid changes instituted by Musk, who purchased the platform in 2022 and has since laid off much of its staff, including workers dedicated to ferreting out misinformation and hate speech.

He also welcomed back a long list of users who had been previously banned, including Trump, and endorsed him in the 2024 presidential race.

‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Shkreli, who was once dubbed “Pharma Bro” after jacking up the price of a lifesaving drug.

Shkreli appealed an order to return $64.6 million in profits he and his former company reaped after monopolizing the market for the medication and drastically increasing its price. His lawyers argued that the money went to his company rather than him personally.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, as is typical, and there were no noted dissents.

Prosecutors, though, said the company had agreed in a settlement to pay $40 million, and because Shkreli masterminded the scheme he should bear responsibility for repaying profits.

Shkreli was also ordered to forfeit the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the unreleased work that has been called the world’s rarest musical album. The multiplatinum hip-hop group put a single copy of the album up for auction in 2015, on the condition that it not be put to commercial use.

Shkreli was convicted of lying to investors and cheating them out of millions of dollars in two failed hedge funds he operated. Shkreli was CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals — later Vyera — when it raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after obtaining exclusive rights to the decades-old drug in 2015. It treats a rare parasitic disease that strikes pregnant women, cancer patients and AIDS patients.

He defended the decision as capitalism at work, saying insurance and other programs ensured that people who need Daraprim would ultimately get it. But the move sparked outrage, from the medical community to Congress.

Attorney Thomas Huff said the Supreme Court’s Monday decision was disappointing, but also said the high court could yet overturn a lower court decision that made the $64 million penalty order possible even though Shkreli hadn’t personally gotten the money.

“If and when the Supreme Court does so, Mr. Shkreli will have a strong argument for modifying the order accordingly,” he said.

Shkreli was released from prison in 2022 after serving much of a seven-year sentence.

Texas officer

The Supreme Court won’t hear an appeal from a former Texas police officer convicted in the death of a woman who was shot through a window of her home.

The justices did not detail their reasoning, as is typical, and none publicly dissented.

Aaron Dean was convicted of manslaughter in Atatiana Jefferson’s fatal shooting, and he was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Dean was originally charged with murder. He argued on appeal that prosecutors should not have been allowed to ask the jury to consider the lesser charge at the end of the trial.

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Dean, who is white, shot Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, on Oct. 12, 2019, after a neighbor called a nonemergency police line to report that the front door to Jefferson’s home was open.

It later emerged that Jefferson and her nephew had left the doors open to vent smoke after he had burned hamburgers, and the two were up late playing video games.

Dean’s guilty verdict was a rare conviction of an officer for killing someone who was also armed with a gun.

During the trial, the primary dispute was whether Dean knew Jefferson was armed. Dean testified that he saw her weapon. Prosecutors said the evidence showed otherwise.

Body camera footage showed that Dean and a second officer who responded to the call did not identify themselves as police at the house. Dean and the other officer testified that they thought the house might have been burglarized and they quietly moved into the fenced-off backyard looking for signs of forced entry.

There, Dean, whose gun was drawn, fired a single shot through the window a moment after shouting at Jefferson, who was inside, to show her hands.

Jefferson’ nephew testified that she took out her gun because she believed there was an intruder in the backyard.

Lindsay Whitehurst reports for The Associated Press.