“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett found himself at the center of an embarrassing legal saga in 2021, after a jury in Cook County, Illinois found him guilty of five out of six charges of felony disorderly conduct for making allegedly fabricated police reports claiming he’d been the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019.
Sentenced to 150 days in county jail, plus 30 months of probation and $130,000 in restitution in a push on the case when the Cook County state’s attorney asked the state to conduct an independent inquiry with a special prosecutor after the charges against him were initially dropped in March 2019, Smollett’s case has taken yet another turn.
An opinion released on Thursday by the Illinois Supreme Court now rules that the special prosecutor’s decision to retry Smollett violated his rights, according to Variety, stating, “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. 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.”
In a statement made to press following this latest development, special prosecutor Dan Webb — who indicted Smollett again in February 2020 — said, “Make no mistake — today’s ruling 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. In fact, Mr. Smollett did not even challenge the sufficiency of the evidence against him in his appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court.”
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