In heartfelt pleas, former Governor Rod Blagojevich’s daughters begged President Barack Obama to free their father from Federal Prison.
Those pleas fell on deaf ears as Blagojevich’s name was not on the final list of commutations released by the White House Thursday.
“My dad has always been an amazing father,” Amy Blagojevich wrote the president, as part of the former governor’s clemency petition last November. “I am pleading to you to let my father return home to us.”
Blagojevich's wife shared the letters after learning the news Thursday, saying "maybe [the president] never saw them, so I'm posting them here."
In her letter, Blagojevich’s younger daughter Annie told the president she barely remembers what it was like to have her father at home.
“I don’t really understand all the legal stuff,” she wrote. “I just know that for a while we were really happy, and then all of a sudden my whole life fell apart.”
For her part, Patti Blagojevich expressed disappointment that her husband’s name was not on the final list of 330 commutations.
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“This is so hard on my girls,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “Even though I try to tell them not to get their hopes up, it is still crushing.”
Blagojevich has served five years of a 14 year sentence. He is incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Center in Englewood, Colorado.
“What has happened to my dad and to my family is not something that I would wish on my worst enemy,” Amy wrote. “I am pleading for you to let my father return home to us."
The older Blagojevich daughter, a student at Northwestern University, noted that her father was arrested when her little sister was just five years old.
“He doesn’t belong in jail,” she said. “And if the law did, in fact, back up the federal prosecutors, he definitely doesn’t belong in there for the 14 years he was sentenced to—or 12 for good behavior. So please Mr. President, please let him come home to take care of his family.”
