Overview
- Multiple outlets reported on July 15, 2026, that lawyers for R. Kelly filed a clemency petition this year that the Office of the Pardon Attorney now lists as pending and under review.
- The filing explicitly asks for a commutation to reduce Kelly’s 30-year federal sentence rather than a full pardon.
- Kelly was convicted in separate federal cases for racketeering and sex trafficking in New York (2021) and child pornography in Chicago (2022) and is serving his sentence at a federal facility in Butner, North Carolina.
- His attorneys have repeatedly raised safety and mistreatment claims while incarcerated, and they say Kelly was placed in special housing for nearly two weeks in March and was later released after an internal review found no impropriety related to a retired warden’s phone number.
- A pending designation means the Pardon Attorney has opened the petition but will not publicly disclose review details, and any final outcome would depend on the office’s process and the president’s discretionary clemency decisions; if no commutation is granted, reporting projects Kelly’s release in the mid-2040s.