Josh Duggar’s lawyers have filed a notice of appeal after he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for child pornography.
According to the document, the 34-year-team’respectfully old’s sends notice of his desire to analyze and pursue any and all meritorious arguments in his appeal.’
They haven’t filed the entire appeal yet.
Last month, Duggar, a father of seven, was sentenced to prison on one count of downloading child pornography.
Because of the sexual assault he inflicted on his sisters as a teenager, he received a heavier punishment.
His lawyers had begged with the judge for mercy, and members of his family had also pled his case, claiming he was a kind person.
Duggar has been in custody since December when a federal jury found the 19 Kids and Counting alum guilty of possession and receipt of child pornography.
The possession charge was dropped at his sentencing.
‘The photographs were some of the worst this court has ever seen,’ Judge Brooks told Duggar at Wednesday’s hearing, while his wife Anna, 33, sat a few yards behind him in the public gallery.
The father-of-seven used the desktop computer at his auto dealership to browse the dark web for hundreds of damaged films and images, the court heard in December.
‘Daisy’s Destruction,’ a well-known film, depicted the abuse and torture of an infant. A girl was whipped with a cat o’ nine tails, tied up, and locked in a dog cage in another series of photographs.
I can’t get the dog kennel image out of my head. The description of Daisy’s Destruction is horrific, it’s sick,’ the Judge
I can’t get the image of a dog kennel out of my thoughts. ‘The depiction of Daisy’s Destruction is awful, it’s nasty,’ said Judge Brooks during his sentence remarks.
The’sadistic’ nature of the assault, the ages of the children involved, and his inability to admit his guilt, he said Duggar, aggravated his crimes.
Judge Brooks stated that the small girl in Daisy’s Destruction appeared to be no older than a newborn, labeling the book as the “sickest of the sickest.”
Duggar, who wore a grey suit and sported a scruffy beard and a grown-out buzz cut, was also given a longer sentence for sexually abusing his own sisters as a teenager.
‘As the court has found, you have a history of sexual abuse. One of the Jane Does was five-year-old, you were 15,’ Judge Brooks added.
‘You [remain] locked into the very same age group as the Jane Does. We can say it’s been a long time, and it has. But the sexual interest is the same.’
Duggar was sentenced solely on a charge of receiving pornography after prosecution and defense attorneys agreed to vacate a lesser offense of possession.
Duggar showed little emotion as he was led away by US marshals, looking back at Anna and making a heart shape with his hands, which she reciprocated.
Neither Anna, wearing a pretty blue dress and black mask, nor his dad Jim Bob, spoke as they left court.
The decision came one day after Brooks denied a defense motion to overturn the guilty verdict on grounds of insufficient evidence or to order a new trial.
Defense attorneys had asked for a five-year stretch, the lightest possible punishment, insisting that Duggar, said to be a devoted dad and committed Christian, maintained his innocence and intended to appeal.
They argued that, of the approximately 600 child porn images identified by investigators, only a small portion had been viewed and none of those fell into the category of ‘sadistic or masochistic’.
Prosecutors demanded a 20-year term – the maximum possible – arguing that it was hard to think of anything more sadistic that a grown man raping a little girl.
They said Duggar had never sought treatment or shown any acceptance of his warped appetites and thus had a high chance of re-offending.
To illustrate the lasting devastation done to child pornography victims, the government reproduced testimony from the mother of a young girl who had appeared in one of the videos Duggar downloaded.
My daughter is a real person,’ the mother stated. ‘She was horribly victimized to provide this source of ‘entertainment’. She is exploited anew each and every time an image of her suffering is copied, traded or sold.
‘I asked my daughter what she most wanted to ask of the judge. Her request: ‘Please, don’t let them pretend no-one’s getting hurt!’
‘She had some words for the defendant as well: ‘don’t you know no one should do that to a little girl! Don’t you know it hurts!’
Recalling the mother’s words in court, Judge Brooks described the testimony as ‘chilling’.
‘For the victims it never goes away. It’s on the internet, probably for forever,’ he told the court, which was packed with Duggar’s friends and family.
Feds tracked the IP address to Wholesale Motorcars and seized Duggar’s workplace HP PC, iPhone, and MacBook when she tipped them off.
A closer glance reveals Duggar sporting a characteristic Wholesale Motorcars baseball cap in the dim reflection on the screen. Later that day, he was photographed with his wife wearing the same hat.
Several defense motions contending that the trial was unjust were dismissed by Judge Brooks prior to today’s sentencing, while Duggar remained incarcerated at the Washington County Detention Center awaiting his fate.
Duggar’s lawyers claimed that a former employee or hacker may have taken advantage of his computer’s inadequate internet security and remotely downloaded and viewed child pornography without anybody knowing.