Josh Duggar (left) attending a March for Marriage rally in Washington DC on April 25, 2014. (Patsy Lynch/MediaPunch /IPX), (right) in a Washington County Jail mug shot.
Former “19 Kids and Counting” star and conservative activist Josh Duggar, now 36 and on track to get out of federal prison in October 2032 for the child pornography receipt and possession crimes a federal jury in 2021 found him guilty of committing, tried and failed to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that his alternative perpetrator theory should have been allowed into evidence.
In an orders list on Monday, Duggar’s name was among the dozens of others whose cases were rejected by the justices.
A petition for a writ of certiorari from February showed that Duggar only posed one question for the high court to answer in his case:
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 short, Duggar tried to make the case that his constitutional rights were violated because he was not permitted at trial to accuse Caleb Williams, a reported former Duggar family friend, convicted sex offender and former employee of the inmate’s Arkansas used car dealership, Wholesale Motorcars, as possibly being the actual person who downloaded “hundreds of child-pornography images” on his laptop.
The Supreme Court simply wasn’t interested in going down this road, and the established record in the case shows Duggar never really had a chance at swaying them.
A conservative panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in August 2023 unanimously rejected Duggar’s complaints, pointing out that when the feds came a-knocking at the car dealership in 2021, Duggar blurted out: “What is this about? Has somebody been downloading child pornography?”
Someone had, indeed, downloaded images depicting the sexual abuse of victims “as young as toddlers,” and a jury found that person was Duggar.
But Duggar’s “alternative-perpetrator” theory never emerged at trial, the Eighth Circuit noted, because the trial judge ruled that if Duggar did try “to create reasonable doubt” by calling Williams to testify, he couldn’t bring up Williams’ convicted sex offender status.
“The right to present a complete defense, in other words, does not trump a district court’s discretion to keep out confusing or misleading evidence, even if it would be helpful to the defense,” the circuit court summarized.
Duggar’s lawyer had insisted that grilling Williams in court could have been the difference between a conviction and acquittal.
“If permitted to inquire, Duggar would have established Williams: worked at the business; had familiarity with the computer and its software; engaged in eBay sales and utilized the computer to print labels; sent a text message on May 7, 2019 offering to watch the business that week; spent the night one mile from the business on May 9, 2019; and concealed all metadata on documents provided to the Government in an attempt to establish he was not present,” the Duggar lawyer asserted.
But the government countered that there was exactly “no evidence” indicating that Williams was responsible for Duggar’s crimes. Instead, it all pointed to Duggar, including the fact of his Covenant Eyes software workaround.
“This Court need not even consider the overwhelming evidence implicating Duggar as the culprit, including: the testimony that he had discussed setting up a Linux partition to avoid the Covenant Eyes software; the fact that the partition was created with an unusual password that Duggar had used across numerous accounts for years; and the text messages placing Duggar at his car lot on the same dates and times that CSAM was downloaded on his computer in his office,” a DOJ lawyer argued in 2022. “The critical point is that no evidence inculpates Williams.”
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