After the federal government last week unsealed its indictment alleging Kilmar Abrego Garcia spent nearly a decade smuggling illegal immigrants throughout the United States, its case against the citizen of El Salvador was assigned to Waverly Crenshaw, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, who last December sentenced former Republican lawmaker Brian Kelsey to 21 months in federal prison.
Kelsey was found guilty in 2022 of illegally funneling money from his Tennessee State Senate campaign account to his federal campaign for U.S. Senate.
Having called the charges a political witch hunt, Kelsey initially pleaded guilty and was later denied the opportunity to reverse this plea, despite the former lawmaker citing the stress caused by his father’s terminal illness and the recent birth of his twins.
Kelsey was then sentenced by Crenshaw (pictured above) in August 2023 to 21 months in federal prison, though the judge allowed Kelsey’s bail to remain active while he contested the sentence. This ultimately allowed the former lawmaker to remain free while his attorneys pleaded their case to the Trump administration, which contributed to a pardon from President Donald Trump.
“This pardon validates what Mr. Kelsey has maintained from the beginning — his innocence,” said attorney Alex Little. His firm claimed that prosecutors lost almost 3,000 documents, withheld evidence that could clear Kelsey’s name, “and coerced him into pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit.”
Following his pardon, Kelsey speculated during an appearance on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show that his case resonated with the president, arguing they both experienced weaponized prosecutions under the Biden administration.
“It’s the pressure that they put on you financially and emotionally and mentally. I’m sure that President Trump has felt a little bit of that. I’m sure that he’s had some of the same sleepless nights that I’ve had. He could relate to it personally,” Kelsey told Michael Patrick Leahy, the editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star. “They attacked him personally in four different cases. He knows weaponization when he sees it, and he clearly recognized it immediately.”
Despite being nominated by former President Barack Obama in 2015 and having worked for former Tennessee Attorney General W.J. Michael Cody, a Democrat, during the 1980s, Crenshaw nonetheless enjoys a reputation among Tennessee legal professionals as a by-the-book judge who adheres to the letter of the law.
His confirmation in the U.S. Senate also received the unanimous, bipartisan support of 92 senators in 2016.
A Nashville native, Crewnshaw studied at Vanderbilt University for both his undergraduate and law degrees. The university noted that Crenshaw served as legal counsel to various nonprofits, including the Nashville Bar Association and the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, and in 2017, won the Diversity Award from the Community Foundation of Nashville.
It is unclear whether Abrego Garcia has retained criminal defense attorneys in Tennessee, as public defender Will Allensworth argued for his release last week. It also remains unclear whether Abrego Garcia will opt for a jury trial, resting his fate in the hands of jurors from Middle Tennessee, or whether he will ask for Crenshaw to determine his guilt or innocence in a bench trial.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, Jr.” by Nashville School of Law.
