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 before learning the sentence.
“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 before being being brought to 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 issuing his sentence at the conclusion of a marathon, five-hour hearing, Linn said Smollett’s decision to orchestrate a hoax hate crime on himself on a frigid night in downtown Chicago three years ago read like a bad movie script, one where Smollett invented the plot, hired the actors, chose the time and location provided props, and even rehearsed the racist and homophobic lines.
What bothered the judge the most, he said, was the motive. Smollett’s crime wasn’t one of passion or opportunity, but a deliberate attempt to concoct a story so shocking that it would give him the limelight he desperately wanted, according to Linn.
“You wanted to make yourself more famous,” Linn said. “And for a while it worked. The lights were on you. You were actually throwing a national pity party for yourself.”
The judge also ripped Smollett for doubling down on his lies at trial, when he took the witness stand in “the capper of all cappers” and lied to the jury “for hours upon hours.”
In addition to the five months behind bars, which will be served in the Cook County Jail, Linn sentenced Smollett to three years of probation and ordered him to pay $130,160 in restitution to the city to cover the more than 1,000 hours in police overtime it took to investigate Smollett’s false hate crime report.
Click here to read more.
Source: Chicago Tribune
BCNN1 WP 