A judge has denied R. Kelly’s emergency bid to get released from prison to home confinement over accusations that officials solicited an inmate to murder him.
Robert Kelly, who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for charges related to the sexual exploitation of children, filed an emergency motion last week for his release over bombshell accusations of government misconduct in his case and the subsequent attempts on his life at the hands of prison officials.
Judge Martha Pacold concluded earlier today in a filing that the court “lacks jurisdiction over this matter.” As Kelly is housed outside of the court’s judicial district, Pacold wrote, “Kelly has not demonstrated a legal basis for this court’s jurisdiction. Accordingly, his emergency motion is denied.” A hearing scheduled for Friday was also canceled.
In response to the denial, Kelly’s attorney Beau Brindley shared in a statement to Variety that he plans to file a motion today to vacate his convictions in Chicago based on newly discovered evidence and request an immediate release. “We are not surprised by this ruling as we knew that technical jurisdiction would be a challenge under these circumstances,” says Brindley. “However, we had no choice but to act immediately given explicit evidence of a threat to Robert Kelly’s life.”
On June 10, Kelly filed an emergency motion for temporary furlough, claiming there is explicit evidence that officials solicited an inmate to murder him while in custody at a federal penitentiary in North Carolina. His counsel cited a terminally ill inmate who gave a sworn declaration that officials had promised him freedom in his last days in exchange for Kelly’s murder. Counsel claimed the officials were retaliating against Kelly for planning to expose that officials violated attorney-client privilege by intercepting personal correspondence to help convict him.
Subsequently, Brindley stated that Kelly was “punished” for filing the emergency motion and was moved to solitary confinement, where prison officials gave him “an amount of medicine that could have killed him.” Kelly overdosed and was rushed to the hospital, where he showed doctors a swollen leg, and it was determined that he had blood clots in his legs and lungs. After he was scheduled for surgery, officials apparently removed him from the hospital “against his will and against the directives of the doctors.”
“I can now confirm that this threat is ongoing and it is more serious than ever,” Brindley says. “Mr. Kelly remains in prison with blood clots in his lungs, this threatens his life every minute that he is denied the surgical intervention (pulmonary embolectomy) that Duke University hospital doctors sought to perform, but were prevented from executing. The danger could not be more imminent.”
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