The family of disgraced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick hopes President Obama doesn’t forget standing at a podium and declaring his support for the mayor’s re-election.

“I want to first of all acknowledge your great mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick,” then-Sen. Obama said in 2007. “We know that he is going to be doing astounding things for many years to come.”

Six years later, the mayor found himself guilty of racketeering, extortion and bribery and sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Now, Kilpatrick’s family is hoping the president will pardon the former mayor and set him free.

ABC 7 reports that the ex-mayor’s brother-in-law Daniel Ferguson confirms that he and others will pursue the pardon from the president.

Not knowing if the president would actually do it, Ferguson says of Kilpatrick and his brother Bobby, “In my opinion, they did nothing at all to be put in jail.”

Fox Detroit described the allegations during their trial:

Prosecutors said Kilpatrick ran a “private profit machine” out of Detroit’s City Hall. The government presented evidence to show he got a share of the spoils after ensuring that Bobby Ferguson’s excavating company was awarded millions in work from the water department.

Business owners said they were forced to hire Ferguson as a subcontractor or risk losing city contracts. Separately, fundraiser Emma Bell said she gave Kilpatrick more than $200,000 as his personal cut of political donations, pulling cash from her bra during private meetings. A high-ranking aide, Derrick Miller, told jurors that he often was the middle man, passing bribes from others.

Such a pardon of an illustrious character wouldn’t be unprecedented.

President Clinton pardoned “internationally notorious” fugitive financier Marc Rich in 2001, hours before leaving office, in the words of Slate.

Rich was a pioneering commodities trader who made billions dealing in oil and other goods. He had a habit of dealing with nations with which trade was embargoed, like Iran, Libya, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa. Rich also had a habit of not paying his taxes, to the point where one observer said that “Marc Rich is to asset concealment what Babe Ruth was to baseball.” The United States indicted Rich in 1983, hitting him with charges—tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, trading with the enemy—that could’ve brought life in prison. Rich fled the country.

With assistance of then-deputy attorney general Eric Holder, Rich was pardoned.