The federal judge presiding over R. Kelly’s criminal case in Chicago concluded Thursday she has no authority to rule on his request to be moved to home detention amid what he claims is a plot by prison officials to have him killed.
U.S. District Judge Martha Pacold denied Kelly’s request, finding that she has no jurisdiction to grant it. She also canceled a hearing that had been scheduled for Friday.
In doing so, the judge dispensed with the only pending motion from Kelly’s lawyers. They’ve yet to seek help from a judge in Brooklyn — the site of his original 2021 conviction — or in North Carolina — where he’s imprisoned.
Still, attorney Beau Brindley said their legal battle is not over and insisted the danger to Kelly “could not be more imminent.”
In handing down her ruling, Pacold scuttled what threatened to be a tense in-person hearing at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse. Brindley and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Julien have spent the week trading barbs in court filings.
Brindley recently accused Julien of “hypocritically” trying to “downplay the threat against Mr. Kelly.”
That was after Julien insisted Pacold “should not allow Kelly to turn [her] docket into a grocery store checkout aisle tabloid.”
Kelly burst back into the headlines last week by claiming federal prison officials had enlisted a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood to kill the former R&B superstar to prevent the disclosure of damaging information.
Since making that allegation, Brindley says Kelly has been moved into solitary confinement, refused to eat the food offered him for fear of poisoning and was given an overdose of his medication by prison staff.
The overdose led to Kelly’s hospitalization, Brindley says. At the hospital, staff purportedly found blood clots in Kelly’s legs and lungs, and made plans for surgery. But Brindley says Kelly was forcibly removed from the hospital by prison officials.
Kelly continues to be held at a medium-security prison facility in Butner, North Carolina, records show. The 58-year-old is serving a 30-year sentence for his racketeering and sex-crime conviction in New York, as well as a mostly simultaneous 20-year sentence for his 2022 child pornography conviction in Chicago.
The inmate allegedly recruited to kill him, Mikeal Glenn Stine, has been moved to a facility in Virginia.
Brindley said he’d appeal to President Donald Trump for help.