An appellate court upheld R. Kelly’s conviction for child pornography and child enticement charges in Chicago on Friday (April 26). Kelly’s attorneys claimed the charges were filed after the statute of limitations expired. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit disagreed.
“For years, Robert Sylvester Kelly abused underage girls,” the court noted. “By employing a complex scheme to keep victims quiet, he long evaded consequences. In recent years, though, those crimes caught up with him at last. But Kelly—interposing a statute of limitations defense—thinks he delayed the charges long enough to elude them entirely. The statute says otherwise, so we affirm his conviction.”
The appellate court also denied Kelly’s request for a new sentencing hearing. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his Chicago conviction. His lawyers argued the sentence was too harsh.
Most of Kelly’s sentence will be served concurrently with a 30-year sentence for racketeering and sex trafficking charges in New York. Judge Harry Leinenweber ordered Kelly to serve one more year behind bars once the disgraced singer completed the New York sentence. The appellate court said Kelly’s arguments ignored the realities of his intertwined sentences.
“Kelly challenged the 72 months added to the high end of his Guidelines range,” the court wrote. “That challenge is beside the point. What matters most is the 30-year New York sentence, which the district court called ‘the elephant in the room’ at sentencing. The sentence Kelly ultimately received was fashioned with the New York sentence in mind. Kelly’s nominal above-Guidelines sentence cannot be fairly assessed without reference to its running concurrently with the New York sentence—what looks like 240 for this Illinois conduct is, with that context, more like twelve.”
The court concluded, “An even-handed jury found Kelly guilty, acquitting on several charges even after viewing those abhorrent tapes. No statute of limitations saves him, and the resulting sentence was procedurally proper and—especially under these appealing circumstances—substantively fair.”
Kelly is appealing his New York conviction. He remains in a federal correctional center in North Carolina.