Jussie Smollett’s conviction overturned in alleged hate crime fraud

The years-long saga of Jussie Smollett’s fake hate crime appears to be finally over. On Thursday, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his 2021 disorderly conduct conviction and declared that the actor will not have to report to prison after all.

“Today we resolve an issue of the state’s responsibility to honor the agreements it enters into with defendants,” the court wrote in its decision. “In particular, we consider whether a dismissal of a case by nolle prosequi allows the state to initiate another prosecution when the dismissal was entered into as part of an agreement with the defendant, and the defendant has fulfilled his part of the agreement. We believe that second prosecution under these circumstances is a violation of due process, and we therefore reverse defendant’s conviction.”

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Back in 2019, Smollett was best known for his role as Jamal Lyon in the TV series Empire. But he made headlines for a different reason on January 29 of that year when he was allegedly attacked by two unknown assailants on his way to Fox’s studio in Chicago. The men allegedly used racist and homophobic slurs and threw a rope around his neck, shouting “MAGA” (for Make America Great Again, then-President Donald Trump’s well-known political slogan). Smollett spent a short time in the hospital, and the situation was initially investigated as a hate crime by the Chicago Police Department until investigators found evidence that Smollett had actually colluded with his “attackers” to stage the incident. A grand jury subsequently indicted him on 16 felony counts of falsifying police reports and lying to investigators.

But Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recused herself from the investigation, and the assistant state’s attorney appointed to oversee the case in her absence struck a deal with Smollett’s defense team. All of those charges were dropped in exchange for Smollett performing community service and paying a $10,000 bond to the city of Chicago. He was also written off Empire by creator Lee Daniels and did not participate in the series’ final season.

This decision was not very popular. Both Trump and Rahm Emanuel, then the mayor of Chicago, publicly disagreed with the dropping of charges against Smollett. Foxx, in particular, was heavily criticized for her refusal and her endorsement of office, which was used against her by political opponents when she ran for re-election in 2020 (although she was ultimately successful in that race).

In 2020, a special prosecutor was appointed to reopen the case. It went to a jury trial that time, and Smollett was convicted of disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to 30 months of felony probation, with the first 150 days to be served in county jail. But Smollett never served that sentence. He appealed the sentence, and although the Illinois Appellate Court upheld the original ruling, he appealed it again, and now the Illinois Supreme Court has reversed the decision, saying that since the government had made a deal with Smollett and he had fulfilled his end of the deal, there was no legal basis to try him again.

“We realize 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 unfair,” the Illinois Supreme Court wrote in their decision this week. “Yet what would be more unjust than the resolution of a single criminal case would be a finding by this court that the state was not obligated to honor agreements upon which people have injuriously relied.”

The court’s logic is very similar to that used by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when it overturned Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction and released him from prison in 2021, saying the conviction was based on depositions Cosby had given in a civil case only after being guaranteed that he would not be prosecuted (which meant that he could not invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination). Indeed, the Illinois court cites the Pennsylvania court’s decision in the final pages of its judgment.

You can read the Illinois Supreme Court’s full ruling here.