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Disgraced singer R. Kelly’s emergency motion to get released from prison early amid claims that prison officials tried to get an inmate to murder him, has been denied by a judge.
According to Variety, Kelly, who is serving a 30-year prison sentence for several charges, including sexual exploitation of children, filed an emergency motion to be released to home confinement, claiming that prison officials were trying to kill him.
“Judge Martha Pacold concluded earlier today in a filing that the court ‘lacks jurisdiction over this matter,’” Variety reports.
“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.”
Kelly’s attorney, Beau Brindley, told Variety that he plans to file a motion looking to vacate the “I Believe I Can Fly” singer’s Chicago convictions based on new evidence that Brindley believes will grant Kelly an immediate release.
“We are not surprised by this ruling as we knew that technical jurisdiction would be a challenge under these circumstances,” Brindley told Variety. “However, we had no choice but to act immediately given explicit evidence of a threat to Robert Kelly’s life.”
Kelly filed an emergency motion, June 10, claiming there was proof that prison officials tried to get an inmate to murder him while he was locked up in a federal penitentiary in North Carolina.
Kelly’s attorneys claimed that officials promised a terminally ill prisoner freedom in his final days as long as he killed Kelly. Kelly’s attorneys claim that prison officials were looking to have Kelly murdered to stop him from exposing that they violated attorney-client privilege by using information obtained in personal correspondence to help convict him.
From Variety:
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.”
See social media’s reaction to the ruling below.
