In December, Jussie Smollett was found guilty on five out of six charges related to his January 2019 hoax attack. In January 2019, Smollett claimed that he was jumped by white men in MAGA hats. He claimed the men assaulted him and hung a noose around his neck. While investigating Smollett’s police report, cops figured out (within hours/days) that the story was fishy as hell. I’m not even going to try to recap all of the legal shenanigans which happened then, suffice to say, about a year ago, Smollett was charged with filing a false police report and six counts of felony disorderly conduct. He was found guilty of most of those charges in December, and on Thursday, he was sentenced in what was a mind-numbingly long five-hour hearing. Smollett could have been sentenced up to three years in prison. The judge ruled yesterday that Smollett will serve 150 days in jail, pay thousands in fines and serve 30 months of probation. The sentencing was a complete sh-tshow.
Shortly after being ordered into custody to begin serving 150 days in jail on Thursday, actor Jussie Smollett finally started to speak. He was innocent, he said. He was not suicidal. Then the former “Empire” actor stood up at the defense table and began talking directly to Judge James Linn, something he’d declined to do during the hearing.
“I respect you, your honor,” Smollett said, his voice rising as he gestured with his hands as though he wanted to say more. “I respect your decision. Jail time? I am not suicidal. … If anything happens to me in there I did not do it to myself!”
As Smollett’s attorney tried in vain to get the judge to stay his decision, Smollett was slowly surrounded by sheriff’s deputies before being led from the courtroom, pausing to pump his fist in the air as he disappeared from view into a rear lockup. With that, Smollett’s case, undoubtedly the most high-profile Class 4 felony to ever be tried in Chicago, came to a dramatic end.
In addition to the five months behind bars, which will be served in Cook County Jail, Linn sentenced Smollett to 30 months of probation and ordered him to pay $130,160 in restitution — less the $10,000 in bond forfeiture Smollett had previously agreed to — to the city to cover the more than 1,000 hours in police overtime it took to investigate Smollett’s false hate crime report. He also ordered Smollett to pay the maximum fine of $25,000.
Linn’s decision to lock up Smollett came at the end of his lengthy oral ruling and seemed to shock Smollett’s relatives in the courtroom gallery. Afterward, in the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Smollett’s sister and two brothers told reporters they still believed in his innocence.
[From The Chicago Tribune]
Judge Linn told Smollett that he orchestrated the hoax crime, invented the plot, hired the actors and rehearsed the script. The judge told Smollett that the most disturbing part of Smollett’s crimes was the motive: “You wanted to make yourself more famous. And for a while it worked. The lights were on you. You were actually throwing a national pity party for yourself.” God, the judge is so right. Damn. Anyway, 150 days in jail is pretty rough, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been. That’s basically five months in jail and the rest is probation. Even the fines are not that bad. I absolutely wonder what Smollett’s long-time friends and coworkers think of how all of this ended up. He conned them too.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red.
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