Kim Kardashian thanks Colorado governor for reducing trucker’s sentence to 10 years

Kim Kardashian has thanked Colorado governor Jared Polis for reducing truck driver Rogel Aguilera-Mederos’s lengthy 110-year prison sentence over a deadly car crash to 10 years.

On 13 December 2021, Judge A Bruce Jones sentenced Aguilera-Mederos to over a century in jail for his role in a pile-up on a Colorado highway in 2019. Aguilera-Mederos was found guilty of 27 charges, including four counts of vehicular homicide.

A Cuban immigrant who was 23 at the time, Aguilera-Mederos was driving an 18-wheeler semi-truck along Interstate 70 in Lakewood, near Denver, for his job with a trucking company. After the vehicle’s brakes failed, it crashed into 28 cars, causing a huge explosion and killing four commuters stuck in rush hour traffic.

Earlier this month, Kardashian backed growing calls for Polis to commute Aguilera-Mederos’s sentence. She said she took a “deep dive” into Aguilera-Medero’s case, which has garnered national and international attention, to “figure out what the situation is”.

At the time, in posts addressed to her 271 million followers, Kardashian wrote: “He [Aguilera-Mederos} was not drunk or under the influence [at the time of the crash]. His brakes on the semi-tractor trailer failed.”

On Thursday (30 December), Governor Polis reduced Aguilera-Mederos’s jail time to 10 years.

In his commutation letter to Aguilera-Mederos, Polis wrote: “The length of your 110-year sentence is simply not commensurate with your actions, nor with penalties handed down to others for similar crimes.”

Soon after, Kardashian, who has emerged a staunch advocate of US prison reform, shared a copy of the official executive order, and thanked Polis for his “empathy and leadership” on this case, in a series of Instagram stories.

The 41-year-old reality TV star wrote on Instagram: “While his new sentence is 10 years, he will now have an opportunity to come home in five years and be with his son and wife. [This case] was a clear example of why mandatory minimums don’t work and need to be abolished.”

Kardashian, who is studying to become a lawyer, recently announced she had passed California’s first-year law students exam (or the “baby bar”).