Weeks after being sentenced to 30 years on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, R. Kelly and his attorney have let a federal court know that they intend to appeal his conviction on racketeering charges, according to ABC News.
Jennifer Bonjean, Kelly’s attorney, filed a notice of appeal on Monday but did not share the specifics on what grounds Kelly intends to challenge the verdict and 30-year prison sentence.
During the sentencing hearing, Kelly’s attorneys argued that the disgraced R&B singer should have been sentenced to no more than ten years and that anything more than 25 years is unnecessary and would be the same as giving him a life sentence, given his age.
From ABC News :
After Kelly was sentenced last month, Bonjean announced she would be appealing the case, maintaining that he is not an abuser. Kelly was temporarily placed on suicide watch following the sentencing.
“Mr. Kelly is fine,” a lawyer for Kelly told reporters outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse after the sentencing. “We believe that this enterprise was overcharged.”
The defense cast many of R. Kelly’s victims as groupies who willingly went along with Kelly’s sexual demands and said prosecutors misapplied racketeering statutes to Kelly’s case.
In September, Kelly was convicted on one charge of racketeering and eight counts of violation of the Mann Act, a federal sex-trafficking law that criminalizes “the transportation of ‘any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.’”
Some of the charges also included a bribery scheme that involved a public official trying to get a fake ID for the late singer Aaliyah, so Kelly could marry her when she was 15 and he was 27, according to ABC.
During closing arguments, Kelly’s attorney’s made some outlandish closing arguments in his defense including comparing him to Martin Luther King Jr., Hugh Hefner and Mike Pence.