R. Kelly’s legal team is ramping up efforts to lobby President Donald Trump for clemency as the singer serves a decades-long prison sentence for sex crimes.
Case filings before the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney show that the disgraced R&B star (Robert Sylvester Kelly) has a pending petition for commutation of his 31-year prison sentence for racketeering, sex trafficking, child pornography and enticing minors for sex. A presidential commutation would wipe Kelly’s sentence but leave his conviction intact, as opposed to a full pardon.
The actual text of the clemency petition, first reported by the Chicago Tribune on Tuesday (July 14), was not available. It’s not clear exactly when the application was submitted, only that it was at some point in 2026. Kelly’s lawyer did not return a request for details on Wednesday (July 15).
Historically, the Pardon Attorney’s office has conducted a structured, multi-level review of clemency applications before deciding whether to send a recommendation along to the White House for a final decision. Trump, however, has been known to break with this tradition and grant pardons and commutations unilaterally based largely on lobbying within his inner circle. As Mark Osler, a leading clemency attorney and law professor at the University of St. Thomas told Billboard last year, “The mechanism is falling apart.”
Kelly’s legal team seems to understand this; even before filing an official clemency petition, his lawyer, Beau Brindley, has been publicly appealing to Trump directly for relief. Last June, for example, Brindley said in a statement to Billboard that Trump “is the only one with both the power and the courage” to set Kelly free.
The attorney has also not given up on securing Kelly’s release through the court system. While the former singer’s appeals have all been rejected by higher courts, Brindley is still pursuing a new trial in Chicago. He argued in a series of court filings last year that jailhouse officials were trying to kill Kelly, though a judge quickly rejected his calls for immediate release.
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