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Josh Duggar Wants New Trial, Attempts To Blame Ex-Employee For Child Porn On His Computer
Josh Duggar's attorneys are asking for a retrial, noting that their client's former employee — who they say is a sex offender — also had access to the computer where child porn was discovered.
Disgraced reality star Josh Duggar has asked a judge to give him a new trial, blaming a former employee of his used car lot for the child porn found on his computer.
Attorneys for Josh Duggar, 33, filed a motion on Wednesday asking for an acquittal of their client, Insider reports. It comes about a month after Duggar was convicted in federal court of one count of receipt of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography. He is expected to be sentenced in April, when he faces up to 20 years behind bars for each count.
The motion complains that Duggar was prevented from calling a "necessary witness" — his former employee — during the trial. The person used to work for Duggar at the “19 Kids and Counting” star’s used car lot in Springdale, Arkansas, according to Insider, which is where videos and photos of child porn were discovered on a desktop computer.
The motion argues that the former employee had "regularly used the desktop computer in the months and weeks leading up to May 2019." They note the person is also a registered sex offender and that he, along with others, had access to Duggar’s passwords.
During the trial, Duggar's defense had hinted that someone else could have downloaded the child sexual abuse material, noting that no other material of that nature was found on his other personal devices.
Prosecutors, however, argued that data from Duggar’s iPhone placed him at the car dealership when a secret Linux partition was installed on the computer. They said data also placed him there when the images depicting child pornography were downloaded onto the hard drive just days later, The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.
Correspondence between the ex-employee and the prosecution — including a conversation about the passwords — was not included in the trial.
"In this case, Duggar was deprived of materially exculpatory evidence until the evening before the Government rested its case," his attorneys wrote, Insider reports.
Duggar rose to fame during the TLC show “19 Kids and Counting,” which was canceled in 2015 after an earlier police report was uncovered that accused Duggar of sexually abusing four underage girls, some of whom were his sisters. He was then embroiled in another scandal that same year after it was revealed that he had been cheating (or trying to cheat) on his wife through the infidelity website Ashley Madison.
