I just read an interesting article from a few-months-old Newsweek. Here's a summary of it:
R. Kelly was arrested over 5 years ago on 21 counts of child pornography. There is a videotape of him having sex with and urinating on an underage girl, which has of course found it's way into bootleg copies being distributed to the public. That seems to be fairly incriminating evidence. And yet Kelly has not faced trial. A trial date is not even set. He has gone on to record 3 succesful albums since being arrested. This was after he married Aaliyah in 1994, illegally while she was 15 years old (he was 28). He has also been sued four times for sexual misconduct and is believed to have settled out of court each time. He claims innocence in the case, saying that the person in the videos is not him, it just looks a lot like him, and he somehow ended up with posession of these tapes of his doppleganger committing illegal acts. What's the hold up on attempting to prove Kelly's guilt? Around 30 motions have been filed by his lawyers; this is considered by many to be a stall tactic until the girls in the videos become adults, at which point they are less recognizable and less easily sympathized with.
Some people are claiming that the push for justice is not as large because of the race of the girls. In my opinion, this shows class differences more than racial inequities. Kelly has money, and his freedom is allowing him to keep making money, which is funding those lawyers to keep stalling. Additionally, by stalling, his legal troubles have fallen out of the headlines due to the lack of action on the case, which keeps public opinion from demanding that the judicial process be sped up. Kelly knows how to work people, and he's working the psychology of the public and potential jurors to soften the blow of his crimes as much as possible. It seems that there is something intuitively wrong with this, that something should be done to expedite the process. It also seems that if a public defender filed all of these motions for some broke middle or lower class citizen, they would be moved through in five months instead of five years. I would love for someone to do research into all of the motions filed and find out exactly what the hold up is, as well as what could be done by the prosecution to push forward the process. It's mentioned in the article that Kelly's attorneys have chosen not to use a legal mandate to force a trial within four months. It seems that in cases like this, victims should have the right to a speedy trial as much as the accused. Hmmm...
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Chapelle's R.Kelly song makes me smile.
Nicholas Aden
Self-Promotion