R. Kelly avoids add-on to 30 year sentence
CHICAGO — R. Kelly was sentenced on Thursday to 20 years in prison for child pornography and enticement of minors for sex but will serve all but one of those simultaneously with a 30-year sentence on racketeering and sex trafficking convictions.
U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber ordered that Kelly serve one year in prison following the racketeering sentence, imposed last year in New York.
The central question going into the sentencing in Kelly’s hometown of Chicago was whether Leinenweber would order the 56-year-old Grammy Award winner to serve the sentence simultaneously with or only after he completes the New York term. The latter would have been tantamount to a life sentence.
Prosecutors had acknowledged that a lengthy term served only after the New York sentence could have erased any chance of Kelly ever getting out of prison alive. It’s what they asked for, arguing his crimes against children and lack of remorse justified it.
With Thursday’s sentence, though, Kelly will serve no more than 31 years. That means he will be eligible for release at around age 80, providing him some hope of one day leaving prison alive.
Leinenweber said at the outset of the hearing that he did not accept the government’s contention that Kelly used fear to woo underage girls for sex.
“The (government’s) whole theory of grooming, was sort of the opposite of fear of bodily harm,” the judge told the court. “It was the fear of lost love, lost affections (from Kelly)’. … It just doesn’t seem to me that it rises to the fear of bodily harm.”