The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal of the man convicted of the brutal rape and beating of a Penn State student in 1995, according to court documents.

Scott R. Williams was found guilty in 2024 of a felony count of forcible rape and a felony count of aggravated assault. Williams was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in state prison in March 2024 by Center County Judge Brian Marshall.

Williams and his attorney, J. Andrew Salemme, petitioned the Supreme Court in May 2026, arguing that investigators violated the Fourth Amendment while gathering evidence.

The Supreme Court denied the petition Monday.

Williams was charged with the crimes 26 years after the incident because DNA evidence and a genetic genealogy process identified Williams as the perpetrator, police said.

The incident occurred on May 13, 1995, when officers found a woman in the middle of the 900 block of South Pugh Street covered in blood and naked from the waist down.

The woman had suffered a fractured skull, face, and jaw, and was flown to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville. She was a Penn State student at the time.

Police said the woman was attacked from behind and dragged into a flower bed, where she was beaten with an object and raped. She also allegedly had her keys, credit cards, and student ID stolen during the incident.

Police developed a DNA profile of the alleged perpetrator at the time.

More than two decades later, State College Police detectives Stephen Bosak and Nicole Eckley took over the investigation. They worked with private labs to use the DNA samples in a genetic genealogy process that first finds the perpetrator’s distant relatives before narrowing in on potential suspects.

The process brought the detectives to Williams’ mother and showed she had a 99.999% chance of being the perpetrator’s mother.

Bosak and Eckley went undercover to an event Williams was attending, aiming to obtain a utensil used by Williams to collect a DNA sample. Although Williams did not eat at the event, the two detectives obtained a DNA sample from Williams’ son.

The DNA samples showed a probability beyond 99% that the DNA was the perpetrator’s son’s.

The detectives then collected bags of trash from outside Williams’ home, which the FBI tested. According to the criminal complaint, the samples matched the perpetrator’s DNA.

Williams and Salemme appealed to the Supreme Court almost entirely on the grounds that detectives failed to follow the Fourth Amendment.

In order to keep the case alive, prosecutors used DNA from semen recovered after the assault to charge “John Doe” without knowing the actual suspect’s name.

Once police had a DNA match over two decades later, prosecutors went back to court and asked that Doe’s name be replaced with Williams.

Williams was arrested the next day.

Salemme and Williams argued in a petition for a writ of certiorari that while John Doe DNA warrants are not necessarily unconstitutional, the one used on Williams didn’t actually identify the John Doe by his unique DNA profile.

Salemme said the DNA profile used was just six locations on chromosomes that every human has.

While the Supreme Court’s decision not to take the case is not that the justices believe Salemme and Williams’ constitutional arguments are wrong, it does leave the Pennsylvania Superior Court’s ruling against the appeal in place.