In this January 2016 photo, Duane Ehmer, of Irrigon, rides his horse, Hellboy, in the hills outside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday denied a petition by three Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupiers to hear their appeal of their convictions.

Lawyers for Duane Ehmer, Darryl Thorn and Jake Ryan had argued that their felony convictions should be thrown out because Oregon U.S. District Judge Anna Brown violated their rights to a public trial by excusing more than 400 prospective jurors for cause based on their answers to a written questionnaire, without input from the defendants.

They also argued that Brown unfairly denied their right to a jury trial on the misdemeanor charges they faced.

“The Constitution’s guarantee of the right to a jury trial extends to all criminal prosecutions including petty offenses,” their lawyers wrote in a joint petition to the Supreme Court in July.

The three men were convicted during a second trial in the January 2016 armed takeover of the national wildlife refuge outside Burns.

A jury found Thorn, who worked on security details during the occupation, guilty of conspiring to prevent federal workers from doing their jobs at the refuge through intimidation, threat or force. The other two men on trial, Ehmer and Ryan, were found not guilty of that charge.

The jury, though, found both Ehmer and Ryan guilty of willfully damaging the refuge, or depredation of government property, by using a refuge excavator to dig two deep trenches on the property.

Ehmer and Ryan were sentenced to a year and a day in prison. Thorn was sentenced to a year and a half in prison.

Lawyers for the federal government countered that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed their arguments and found Brown’s decision to excuse prospective jurors without defense input was improper but not enough to reverse the verdicts.

The 9th Circuit also reviewed the materials that Brown had examined and found the potential jurors she let go were reasonably excused, noted Ethan A. Sachs, a government attorney.

In addition, he pointed out, the appellate court rejected the argument that the three were entitled to a jury trial for the misdemeanor “petty offenses.”

“The Supreme Court has emphasized that omitting petty offenses from the scope of the jury-trial right was consistent with the established common law practice at the time of the adoption of the Constitution,” Sachs wrote in response to the petition.

The Supreme Court issued a one sentence statement, denying the joint petition for appeal, with no explanation.

Jason Patrick, also convicted in the occupation and sentenced in 2018 to a year and nine months in prison, was originally part of the same appeal, but he died by suicide in early August in Washington state.