The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday overturned actor Jussie Smollett’s conviction on charges of staging a racist and homophobic attack against himself in 2019 and lying to Chicago police, saying he should not have been charged a second time after reaching a deal with prosecutors.
The ruling, which did not address Smollett's continued claims of innocence, marked a stunning reversal in a case that became part of a polarized political landscape.
Smollett, who is Black and gay, told police in January 2019 that two men assaulted him in his downtown Chicago neighbourhood, spouting slurs, tossing a noose around his neck, and yelling that he was in “MAGA country,” an apparent reference to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” presidential campaign slogan. The report, which made headlines around the world, prompted a massive search for suspects by Chicago police before investigators announced that they believed the attack was a hoax.
The state's highest court found that a special prosecutor should not have been allowed to intervene after Smollett reached a deal with the Cook County state’s attorney in which charges against him were dropped in exchange for him forfeiting his $10,000 bond and performing community service. The deal prompted outrage in part because it did not include any condition that Smollett apologize or admit he staged the attack.
“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 was on the television drama “Empire,” which filmed in Chicago, and prosecutors alleged he staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio’s response to hate mail he received. Testimony at trial indicated he paid $3,500 to two men whom he knew from “Empire” to carry it out. Smollett testified that “there was no hoax” and that he was the victim of a hate crime.
Smollett declined to comment Thursday through a publicist. His attorney Nenye Uche thanked the court for “restoring order to Illinois’ criminal law jurisprudence.”
“This was not a prosecution based on facts, rather it was a vindictive persecution and such a proceeding has no place in our criminal justice system,” Uche said.
The special prosecutor, former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb, said he disagreed with the court’s ruling while noting that it “has nothing to do with Mr. Smollett’s innocence.”
“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 of five counts of felony disorderly conduct,” Webb said.
After Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx's office dropped the initial 16 counts of disorderly conduct, the backlash was swift, with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel calling it “a whitewash of justice.” Webb was appointed special prosecutor and a grand jury restored charges, leading to Smollett's 2021 conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct.
Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in jail — six of which he served before he was freed pending appeal — and was ordered to pay about $130,000 in restitution. Chicago officials are pursuing reimbursement for that amount in police overtime through a civil case.
Foxx told The Associated Press that she was not surprised that the high court found her handling of the case “proper — if unpopular, proper.” She criticized Webb's ensuing “legal machinations,” which she said ignored the tenet of prosecutorial discretion and landed the issue in the “same position we were in in March 2019."
“What they were doing in going to the court to re-prosecute someone because you didn’t like the outcome would have set a horrendous precedent, in which anyone could come in and undermine the work of a prosecutor’s office," said Foxx, who did not seek a third term this year.
Eileen O’Neill Burke, the incoming Cook County state's attorney, declined to comment.
Smollett, a child actor who appeared in 1992 movie “The Mighty Ducks,” has credited his role as a singer on the hip-hop drama “Empire” for turbocharging his career. This year, he starred in the movie “The Lost Holliday” with Vivica A. Fox.
Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis and Justice Joy Cunningham took no part in Thursday’s decision.
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Tareen reported from Chicago.
