Celebrity and criminal justice reform activist Kim Kardashian has joined the public outcry over a 110-year sentence handed down to a truck driver convicted in a deadly 2019 Colorado crash.
On Tuesday, Kardashian tweeted her support for 26-year-old Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, asking Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to grant clemency in the case.
This comes four days after a prosecutor who helped secure the conviction asked the judge to reconsider the sentence. Alexis King, a Jefferson County, Colorado, deputy district attorney, filed a motion Friday for the court to set a hearing.
The motion states, “As Colorado law required the imposition of the sentence in this case, the law also permits the court to reconsider its sentence in an exceptional case involving unusual and extenuating circumstances.”
The filing comes as more than 4.5 million people have signed a Change.org petition urging Polis to grant clemency to Aguilera-Mederos.
Aguilera-Mederos’ sentence was meted out Dec. 13 after he was convicted on 27 counts — including vehicular homicide — for causing a 2019 crash near Denver that killed four people and wounded six others.
Aguilera-Mederos maintains there was little he could do after losing his brakes coming down Interstate 70 out of the Rocky Mountains.
Before issuing the 110-year sentence, Judge A. Bruce Jones said he didn’t want to see Aguilera-Mederos spend the rest of his life in prison, but he did not have the discretion to give a lesser sentence under Colorado law.
The reason Aguilera-Mederos’ sentence was so long was due to Colorado’s so-called “crimes of violence” laws, in which prison sentences must run consecutively, and not concurrently, when they spring from the same incident.
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