The Office of the Pardon Attorney made the clemency filing public this week, and online records show Kelly asked for a commutation rather than a full pardon. The underlying documents weren’t released, and the request is still pending. A separate motion for a new trial is also awaiting a ruling.
Kelly is serving his 30-year sentence at the FCC Butner complex in North Carolina, with a projected release date in 2045. The 30 years came out of his 2021 racketeering and sex trafficking conviction in the Eastern District of New York; a separate Chicago case on child pornography charges pushed his effective term to roughly 31 years. The Second Circuit upheld the New York conviction and sentence in 2025.
The bid follows a year of very public lobbying from attorney Beau Brindley, who first called on Trump to release the singer immediately. Brindley alleged federal authorities schemed to steal Kelly’s mail, flip witnesses against him, then have a member of the Aryan Brotherhood kill him in prison to bury the whole thing. He also said Kelly was hospitalized in June 2025 after an apparent overdose in solitary confinement, and described spiders in his cell and concerns about the food.
At a June 2025 news conference outside the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, Brindley said outright that he was targeting Trump and that the team was “seeking talks with the White House” about Kelly’s future. The White House has not publicly responded to the commutation request.
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