The United States Supreme Court has declined to review the case of a former Baptist minister from the Bootheel who was convicted of sexually assaulting a teen-age girl in 2000.

James Niederstadt of Malden has been convicted to assaulting a 16-year-old. The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis upheld the conviction, dismissing suggestions that Niederstadt shouldn’t be convicted of forcible sodomy, because his vicimt was asleep at the time of the assault.