Supreme Court Rejects Some Big-Name Appeals

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected appeals from some big names like Martin Shkreli, who was once dubbed "Pharma Bro" after jacking up the price of a lifesaving drug, and singer R. Kelly, who's now serving 20 years in prison after being convicted of child sex convictions in Chicago. A look around:

• Shkreli: The former pharmaceuticals chief appealed an order to return $64.6 million in profits he and his former company Turing Pharmaceuticals reaped after monopolizing the market for Daraprim and drastically increasing its price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. His lawyers argued that the money went to his company rather than him personally. He defended the decision as capitalism at work, saying insurance and other programs ensured that people who need Daraprim would ultimately get it. 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.

• Kelly: 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. His lawyers argued that a shorter statute of limitations on child sex crime prosecutions should have applied to offenses dating back to the 1990s. Lower courts previously rejected his arguments. Federal prosecutors have said the video showed Kelly abusing a girl. Kelly has also appealed a separate 30-year sentence for federal racketeering and sex trafficking convictions in New York.
• And in Texas: The high court denied an appeal from a former Texas police officer convicted in the death of a woman who was shot through a window of her home. Aaron Dean was convicted of manslaughter in Atatiana Jefferson's fatal shooting, and he was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Dean, who's 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'd burned hamburgers, and the two were up late playing video games.

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