Jussie Smollett Sentenced to 5 Months in Jail for False Hate Crime Report

Actor and singer Jussie Smollett was sentenced on Thursday to 30 months of felony probation and 150 days in jail for submitting what a jury agreed was a false hate crime report.

Choose James Linn referred to as Smollett “shameful” and “a charlatan pretending to be a sufferer of a hate crime” previous to handing down the sentence, which additionally included practically $150,000 in fines and restitution funds. Smollett will serve his jail sentence in Prepare dinner County jail.

After receiving the sentence, Smollett maintained his innocence to the courtroom, telling Choose Linn, “your honor, I respect you and I respect the jury, however I didn’t do that.” Smollett additionally maintained that he was “not suicidal,” warning the courtroom that “if something occurs to me after I go in there, I didn’t do it to myself.” In line with paperwork obtained by TMZ, Smollett’s authorized group efficiently petitioned for him to obtain protecting custody whereas incarcerated.

After Smollett alleged that he’d been the sufferer of a homophobic and racist assault in January 2019, together with being overwhelmed and choked with a noose, police finally prosecuted the Empire star himself as a substitute, saying that Smollett had orchestrated the attack with two males he knew from the present. In December, a jury agreed, convicting Smollett on 5 out of six felony prices.

Smollett’s household has maintained that he’s an harmless sufferer of the carceral state. “My brother is harmless,” Smollett’s sister Jazz advised CNN. “This shouldn’t be a controversial assertion as a result of it’s the absolute fact.” Protection legal professional Nenye Uche told the press that he’s “100% assured this case can be gained on attraction.”

In an op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times, Prepare dinner County State’s Lawyer Kim Foxx — who dropped the unique prices in opposition to Smollett, then recused herself from his case — referred to as the choice a failure of the felony justice system. Foxx decried the trial’s financial value to convict, at finest, a nonviolent first-time offender, and the “kangaroo prosecution” that had enabled a type of mob justice. “In the meantime,” Foxx wrote, “the households of greater than 50 Black ladies murdered in Chicago during the last 20 years await justice.”

Wherever the reality actually lies within the twisting, weird Smollett saga — which has already spawned its own SVU episode — jail time will solely make the state of affairs worse, each for Smollett and his well being and everybody who has to pay for his incarceration. There’s no queer liberation without prison abolition, in spite of everything, and getting Jussie Smollett off the road isn’t making anybody safer.

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