Prosecutors Urge Appeals Court to Reject Rod Blagojevich's Request for Retrial

Prosecutors are urging the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reject Rod Blagojevich's appeal for a new trial. 

Prosecutors filed a 169-page response late Tuesday, asking the appellate court to reject the former Illinois governor's corruption conviction appeal. 

Defense lawyers filed the appeal on Blagojevich's behalf in July, The Washington Post reports. The appeal asks the Chicago-based appeals court to toss out his convictions or reduce the Illinois Democrat's 14-year prison sentence. In 2011, Blagojevich was convicted of engaging in far-reaching corruption, including trying to profit from appointing someone to the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated when he became president. 

Oral arguments on the appeal will be scheduled soon, and a ruling on the appeal could happen within a number of months. 

It has been over a year since the 56-year-old former governor entered a federal prison in Colorado to begin serving his 14-year sentence. Yet, Blagojevich is still hopeful that he will be granted a new trial. His appellate lawyer, Len Goodman, and attorney Lauren Kaeseberg are working on his appeal, Politico confirms. 

"He is hopeful that his appeal will be successful and that his conviction will be overturned," Goodman said in a statement in March.

His wife Patti and their two daughters speak with him every day, and visit him in prison often. "He is surviving - trying to make the best of an untenable situation," she wrote on Facebook in March, which was the one-year mark of his time in prison.

"He teaches a class on the Civil War, is learning to play the guitar and runs miles and miles around the quarter-mile track that is available to him," she wrote. "But what really gets him through is our visits and the faith that in the end this tremendous injustice will be righted. That we will be a family together again soon."

Blagojevich was convicted of 17 corruption-related charges during a retrial on June 27, 2011. He was also convicted on one count of lying to the FBI.