I Team

VIDEO: Shirtless Rod Blagojevich works out in Colorado prison yard

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Rod Blagojevich seen excersising in Colo. prison

As he waits for word from the White House on whether he will get out of prison early, we now have the first video of Rod Blagojevich behind the wall.

LITTLETON, Colo. (WLS) -- As he waits for word from the White House on whether he will get out of prison early, we now have the first video of Rod Blagojevich behind the wall.

The former governor was shirtless and sporting a full head of gray hair. Although Rod Blagojevich is surrounded by 1,100 male prisoners in the general population at Englewood, Colorado, some of the new video makes him look like a solitary man with his head down in apparent thought as he moves across the mountain landscape.

From the moment on Air Force One last Wednesday when President Donald Trump talked again about possible clemency for the former Illinois governor, there has been a national guessing game about when Mr. Trump might actually do it, especially since he had said the same thing in May of 2018.

"There's nothing evident to us why the president might be revisiting this choice," said Gil Soffer, ABC7 Legal Analyst with Katten Law.

President Donald Trump has suggested he may commute the prison sentence of disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

As legal experts, politicians and news organizations have tried to read a time-frame into President Trump's remarks, Blagojevich wife, Patti, and their two daughters have their hopes up again. The last time she and we saw Blagojevich on the outside was March 15, 2012 as he walked into the Federal Correctional Institution-Englewood in Littleton, Colorado. He is more than halfway through a 14-year sentence.

WATCH: Rod Blagojevich timeline

A timeline of the charges, conviction and incarceration of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.

Seven years and three months later, video of Blagojevich shows him exercising on the prison grounds, shirtless, wearing gym shorts headphones strung around his neck alone in the TV news footage except for a brief, animated encounter with another inmate in the yard.

"I think the 14-year sentence was excessive and harsh," said Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin.

Despite their roots, Durbin says what Blagojevich did was wrong, but that so was his punishment.

"I've compared it against sentences for other crimes-it just doesn't match up," Durbin said. "Something happened in that courtroom-this judge went too far as far as I was concerned. The decision on governor Blagojevich's future is in the hands of the president."

Even though the Justice Department has a process for pardons and commutation and Blagojevich attorneys filed for official leniency last year, the president is making clemency decision on his own outside the ropes, which he is entitled to do, but it means that no one actually knows what's going to happen until it does.

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