The Supreme Court said Monday it will not hear the appeal of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Without comment, the high court put Blagojevich’s appeal on the “rejected” list, a decision that means the 14-year sentence he received for his conviction on corruption charges will be upheld. Blagojevich, now 59, was convicted in 2011 of 18 felonies, including trying to sell the vacant Senate seat once held by President Obama.
He is serving the sentence at a federal prison in Colorado, and is set to be released in May 2024.
Last summer, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out five of his convictions and ordered he be resentenced. However, the Supreme Court said they will not hear his lawyers’ arguments that the remaining counts were also examples of commonplace politics favors, not illegal corruption.
According to NBC Chicago, the one possibility of a change in his sentence would come at the hands of a resentence by U.S. District Judge James Zagel, the judge who sent him to prison.
“It is not possible to call 168 months unlawfully high for Blagojevich’s crimes,” Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote last summer in the decision to throw out the five counts, “but the district judge should consider on remand whether it is the most appropriate sentence.”
