Illinois Supreme Court reverses actor Jussie Smollett's conviction
Actor Jussie Smollett listens as his sentence is read at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, March 10, 2022, in Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune via AP, Pool, File)
The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday announced it had overturned the 2021 felony conviction of Jussie Smollett, a television actor who became even more of a household name five years ago after prosecutors said he falsely reported that he had been the victim of a violent hate crime.
A jury convicted Smollett, a former actor on the Fox show “Empire,” in 2021 of five counts of disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to 150 days in jail and ordered to pay a $25,000 fine along with $120,106 in restitution to the city of Chicago. (By the fifth season of “Empire,” the actor was earning $100,000 per episode, The Washington Post has reported.)
The justices didn’t deny that Smollett, a Black man who identifies as gay, had staged a hate crime and publicly lied about attackers shouting homophobic and racist slurs while beating the actor. The justices wrote that they overturned the case because of a procedural issue - a due-process violation - as the charges had initially been dropped as part of an agreement between prosecutors and Smollett during the years of high-profile legal wrangling.
“We are aware that this case has generated significant public interest and that many people were dissatisfied with the resolution of the original case and believed it to be unjust,” Justice Elizabeth Rochford wrote in the court’s 5-0 opinion. “Nevertheless, what would be more unjust than the resolution of any one criminal case would be a holding from this court that the State was not bound to honor agreements upon which people have detrimentally relied.”
Smollett’s attorney, Nenye E. Uche, told The Post he was grateful to the court for “restoring order to Illinois’ criminal law jurisprudence.”
The case has made its way through seemingly every level of Chicago’s legal system, becoming more complicated with every step.
In January 2019, Smollett reported to Chicago police that he had been beaten and his attackers had poured an unknown chemical on him while hurling slurs and yelling “This is MAGA country,” referring to former president Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Immediately, people started to denounce what appeared to be an atrocious hate crime. But investigators suspected something was off about the allegations. The next month, authorities interviewed the supposed attackers and announced that the interviews “shifted the trajectory of the investigation.”
Police later identified the attackers as a pair of brothers who had worked on “Empire.” Smollett was soon named a suspect. In February 2019, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recused herself from the case, handing it over to an assistant state’s attorney.
Smollett was indicted on 16 counts, including disorderly conduct, in March 2019.
Eighteen days later, prosecutors shocked those who’d been following the case: They were dropping the charges. Part of the rationale, prosecutors said, was Smollett’s lack of a criminal background.
The news sparked immediate backlash from the city’s top leaders. Then-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said the dismissal was “a whitewash of justice,” The Post reported. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said the deal was “brokered” to “circumvent the judicial system.”
Foxx stood by the decision, writing: “We did not exonerate Mr. Smollett. The charges were dropped in return for Mr. Smollett’s agreement to do community service and forfeit his $10,000 bond to the City of Chicago.”
In April, a judge appointed a special prosecutor, Dan Webb, to look into the case and determine whether Foxx had properly recused herself.
Webb and his team wrote a 60-page report that criticized Foxx’s handling of the case and found “substantial abuses of discretion and operational failures,” including an exceptionally lenient deal that dismissed the case. Webb’s report also found that Smollett did have a misdemeanor conviction in 2007 for a DUI and gave false information to police.
Foxx argued in a commentary published by the Chicago Sun-Times that Webb’s report was part a larger trend of prosecutors—including prosecutors who, like her, are Black and are women—having their authority dangerously undermined.
Foxx, in a phone call with The Post after the announcement Thursday, argued that Webb’s report was intended to harm her politically. “He was involved in a political persecution, and Jussie Smollett got to be the vehicle by which he did it,” Foxx said.
Webb’s team filed new charges against Smollett and secured the 150-day sentence against the actor—charges that the state Supreme Court overturned Thursday.
In all, the legal team spent 15,000 hours spanning five years on the case, according to a news release from Webb’s law office after the high court’s decision.
“Make no mistake—today’s ruling has nothing to do with Mr. Smollett’s innocence,” the release said. “The Illinois Supreme Court did not find any error with the overwhelming evidence presented at trial that Mr. Smollett orchestrated a fake hate crime and reported it to the Chicago Police Department as a real hate crime, or the jury’s unanimous verdict that Mr. Smollett was guilty.”
