The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday announced its decision to reverse former "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett's criminal conviction connected to a 2019 hate crime hoax in Chicago.
The court agreed with Smollett's attorneys, who argued that a previous non-prosecution agreement with the Cook County State's Attorney’s Office, along with the decision of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to drop the initial charges, meant that his conviction should be overturned.
Read the Illinois Supreme Court's decision to overturn Smollett's conviction here.
"Today we resolve a question about the State's responsibility to honor the agreements it makes with defendants," Smollett's attorney Mark Geragos said in a statement. "We hold that a second prosecution under these circumstances is a due process violation, and we therefore reverse defendant's conviction."
"We are disappointed in the Illinois Supreme Court's decision today to overturn Jussie Smollett's convictions and sentence, including the award of over $120,000 in restitution to the City of Chicago for its overtime expenses in investigating Mr. Smollett’s fake hate crime," Special Prosecutor Dan K. Webb said in a statement. "We respectfully disagree with the Court’s factual and legal reasoning which upends long-standing Illinois precedent."
Smollett’s legal team had previously moved to dismiss the case on double jeopardy grounds, but the trial court at the time denied both motions. His legal team also argued that he had entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, but again the trial judge denied the motion, according to the court’s ruling Thursday.
During the appeal, Smollett’s attorney, Nenye Uche, argued that a previous agreement with the State's Attorney’s office should have kept a trial from happening in the first place.
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Uche told justices that Smollett and his previous attorneys had struck an agreement with Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx that would have him surrender his $10,000 bond and perform community service in return for the actor not being prosecuted.
"Prosecutorial agreements that induce a defendant’s specific performance should be enforced,” Uche said. “Irrespective of how unpopular the defendant is in the public eye, a deal’s a deal."
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The Illinois court found that Smollett’s case was indeed subject to the double jeopardy clause in the U.S. Constitution and that his agreement with the State’s Attorney’s Office should have been honored.
They cited “terrible policy consequences” of adopting prosecutors' stance on filing the charges again, and also echoed previous rulings that reversing course on non-prosecution agreements would "comport neither with ordinary contract principles nor with the more expansive notions of fundamental fairness that control the relations between a state and its citizens."
The story began in January 2019 when Smollett reported to Chicago police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two men wearing ski masks. The manhunt for the attackers soon turned into an investigation of Smollett himself and his arrest on charges that he’d orchestrated the attack and lied to police about it.
Authorities said Smollett paid two men he knew from work on the TV show "Empire" to stage the attack. Prosecutors said he told them what racist and homophobic slurs to shout.
Smollett maintained his innocence during the trial. During sentencing he shouted that he was innocent.
In March 2022, Smollett was sentenced to five months at the Cook County Jail and 30 months of probation in connection to the conviction of lying to police.
