R. Kelly's third attempt to gain his freedom came crashing down on him when a judge in Chicago quickly turned down his emergency request to be confined to his Chicago apartment. The R&B singer said his life was in jeopardy behind bars, alluding to a twisted murder plot with the help of prison personnel at FCI Butner in North Carolina.
Federal facility officials aren't just ignoring him; they are planning to kill him, according to Kelly's legal team. His lawyers say that staff members at the prison enlisted another inmate to assault him all to prevent Kelly from revealing what he says is a plot to mess with his mail and to scare off anyone who would testify on his behalf.
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The court threw out the motion, stating that it had no authority because Kelly is currently in prison in another district and many miles outside her courtroom's jurisdiction.
That didn't stop Kelly's lawyer, Beau Brindley, from trying to paint a grim picture of his client's life behind bars. "Mr. Kelly is now in solitary confinement," Brindley said, noting that he has been unable to make phone calls to his family, get to the food he bought for himself, or even sleep at all.
"He's got spiders crawling over him in the dark," Brindley said. "He's alone. He's scared. And he doesn't eat anything cooked in the prison kitchen for fear he might be poisoned."
Federal prosecutors pushed back, and hard. They deemed the whole filing "scurrilous," accusing Kelly of converting the justice system into a megaphone rather than a legal forum. To them, this isn't a matter of safety but of strategy and spectacle.
And from a legal perspective, they could be correct. The judge found her jurisdiction too limited and said she has authority only to consider challenges to Kelly's conviction or sentence, not his treatment on a day-to-day basis inside the prison or charges of conspiracy and attempted murder. That hearing was scratched as a result.
"Ignition" is, for now, still at FCI Butner, continuing a 30-year sentence for racketeering, sex trafficking, and child pornography.
Yet Kelly and company are not walking away. Brindley has said that they'll be filing a motion to vacate his convictions, arguing what they describe as the appearance of "newly discovered evidence." They will also seek to have him released on bond.
Not only that, Brindley has taken his plea a step further, publicly imploring Donald Trump to issue a pardon and declaring that Kelly's life is in danger and that his being in prison is a "life or death" issue.
Whether that plea gains any momentum remains to be seen. For the time being, R. Kelly languishes in jail, with claims of being unsafe, unaddressed by the courts, and unaddressed, apparently, by the world.
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