A federal judge has denied an emergency request from R. Kelly to be released from prison to home confinement.
The disgraced music star had sought release from the North Carolina jail amid allegations that prison officials are trying to kill him in a murder-for-hire scheme. It comes after Kelly was hospitalized last week for an apparent drug overdose.
Born Robert Sylvester Kelly, the ex-R&B singer is currently serving a 30-year sentence on various sex crime charges.
On Thursday, Judge Martha Pacold ruled that he had brought this recent request to the wrong court and said that she did not have the jurisdiction to make a decision over his claims. “Kelly is currently housed at FCI Butner, which is located in Butner, North Carolina — outside this judicial district,” she said, according to CBS News. “Kelly has not demonstrated a legal basis for this court’s jurisdiction. Accordingly, his emergency motion… is denied.”
Kelly’s attorney condemned the decision. “We are not surprised by this ruling as we knew that technical jurisdiction would be a challenge under these circumstances,” Beau Brindley said. “However, we had no choice but to act immediately given explicit evidence of a threat to Robert Kelly’s life.”
According to the initial filing, the 58-year-old woke up on June 13 with black spots in his vision. He tried to get up, but fell to the ground.
He then “crawled to the door of the cell and lost consciousness,” the filing states. The document alleges that prison staff had given him an “overdose quantity” of medication on June 12. He was taken to Duke University Hospital.
Kelly remained in the hospital for two days and was set to have surgery for blood clots, according to his attorney, which would mean the inmate would remain in the hospital for two weeks. But when officers assigned to Kelly at the hospital informed FCI Butner officials of this, “within an hour, officers with guns came into his hospital room and removed him.”
Before the incident occurred, Kelly claimed that federal prison officials had conspired to hire a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang to kill him. Mikeal Glenn Stine, the man who allegedly was offered freedom to murder the singer, told Kelly “that his life was absolutely in danger,” the court filing stated.
Federal prosecutors called Kelly’s allegations of a plot to kill him “repugnant to the sentence that this court imposed for deeply disturbing offenses… Kelly refuses to accept responsibility for years of sexually abusing children,” they continued, “and is using this Court’s docket merely to promote himself despite there being no legal basis to be before this Court.”
Kelly was convicted in Chicago in 2022 on childhood pornography charges, accused of making videos of himself sexually abusing three teenage girls, including his 14-year-old goddaughter. A federal jury in New York also convicted him of racketeering and sex trafficking charges in 2021. He is serving his respective 20-year and 30-year prison sentences concurrently.
