Possession of a firearm charge
Gates was sentenced to a 30-month prison term at the East Moline, IL correctional facility for gun charges stemming from a warrant which arose from an October 2013 arrest in Chicago. Gates failed to show up in court in Illinois, leading to his warrant being reissued in December 2016, while he was serving his battery sentence (see section preceding).
He was released on parole on January 10, 2018.
In April 2018, Gates filed a lawsuit (Kevin Gilyard v. John R. Baldwin, Ned Shwartz, and Jason Garnett) against his parole officer, the director of the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC), and its chief of parole for denying his requests to travel outside of Cook County, Illinois, where he was serving his probation, to perform and visit family. He claimed to have missed multiple shows in the intervening months. The case, heard in the USDC for the Northern District of Illinois, was dismissed on May 2, 2018 in a minute order following a summary hearing.
Gates filed an emergency petition requesting injunctive relief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, which heard the case beginning on May 7, 2018. On May 9, 2018, a three judge panel dismissed his emergency petition, and scheduled the case to be heard non-urgently at a later date.
On June 18, Gates was granted his requested voluntary dismissal of his own case (FRAP 42(b)) as the issue had become moot—his parole was terminated early by the Illinois DOC in motu proprio. Gates was therefore no longer under either the authority of his parole officer or that of the MSR agreement that had been at issue. After Ilia Usharovich, Gates' attorney, confirmed that the issue was moot as Gates' parole ended early, the lower court dismissed the case.
Although he missed the JMBLYA music festival in Austin, Texas, which he originally filed his petitions to attend, Gates was able to return to live performances at The Novos in Los Angeles the following June. Gates' parole had originally been projected to expire on January 10, 2019.
