Jussie Smollett’s Conviction for False Hate Crime Claim Is Overturned

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that he should not have been prosecuted a second time after the charges against him had been dismissed with a negotiated agreement.

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the actor Jussie Smollett’s conviction on charges that he lied to the police about being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in 2019. The court ruled that Mr. Smollett had been unjustly prosecuted after he had already reached a deal to resolve the case without jail time.

The decision was a stunning reversal in a case that has seen more than five years of twists and turns. Mr. Smollett was initially regarded as the victim of an ugly hate crime, drawing widespread sympathy and outrage over an apparent attack on a Black and gay actor. But as the Chicago police investigated his report, they grew skeptical of his account, and Mr. Smollett went from victim to suspect to defendant and finally, to convict, when he was found guilty of staging the attack himself and filing a false report. That prompted another wave of outrage.

The court’s decision to overturn the verdict — which rested on the way the case was prosecuted, and not on the underlying facts — may not change many minds in a case that polarized the nation.

Mr. Smollett was starring in the music-industry drama “Empire” in early 2019 when he first reported that he had been the victim of a hate crime in Chicago and claimed that two men had injured him while yelling racist and homophobic slurs, with one of them shouting, “This is MAGA country.” But law-enforcement officials later determined that Mr. Smollett had orchestrated the attack himself, and charged him with a crime.

The prosecutors then agreed to drop the charges against Mr. Smollett in exchange for his agreement to forfeit his $10,000 bond and perform 15 hours of community service. But after an outcry, the case was revived by a special prosecutor, and a jury convicted Mr. Smollett of disorderly conduct for falsely reporting to the police that he had been the victim of a bigoted attack.

At the trial, the prosecution’s key witnesses were two brothers, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, who testified that Mr. Smollett had asked them to carry out the attack. They said that Mr. Smollett had instructed them in detail, giving them a $100 bill to buy supplies for the attack, including ski masks and a red hat meant to indicate that the attackers were supporters of President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Smollett, 42, who has maintained his innocence since the beginning, was sentenced to five months in jail in 2022 but only served six days of the term before he was released on appeal.

Since the criminal case against Mr. Smollett was revived, his lawyers have argued that charging him a second time was a violation of his rights. After years of seeing that argument rejected, the Illinois Supreme Court embraced it.

“Today we resolve a question about the State’s responsibility to honor the agreements it makes with defendants,” Justice Elizabeth M. Rochford wrote in the opinion.

The court found that the second prosecution had violated his due process rights.

“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,” Justice Rochford wrote. “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.”

The Smollett case burst into the public consciousness in January 2019, when Mr. Smollett told police that two masked men had attacked him near his apartment building in downtown Chicago in the early hours of the morning. He said the men had poured bleach on him and put a white rope around his neck. The report of the attack drew attention from high-profile celebrities and politicians — including then Senator Kamala Harris, who called the attack an “attempted modern day lynching.”

But as the Chicago police investigated his report, they grew skeptical about his story, and he was charged with filing a false report. Then the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office abruptly dropped all of the initial charges filed against him, prompting another wave of condemnations — and drawing criticism from the city’s mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, and Mr. Trump.

A retired judge from Illinois subsequently petitioned the court to assign a special prosecutor to get the “whole truth” of what happened in the case and Dan K. Webb, a former United States attorney and a high-profile Chicago lawyer who had worked as a special counsel in the Iran-contra affair, assumed that role. He secured a new indictment, took the case to trial, and won a conviction.

Mr. Smollett’s lawyers objected to the second prosecution. They argued that the deal they struck with the state when the charges were initially dismissed was a nonprosecution agreement, and that a second prosecution amounted to double jeopardy, since he had already been punished for the offenses.

In battling Mr. Smollett’s appeal of the case, Mr. Webb and his team have argued that Mr. Smollett’s forfeiture of his bond and his community service were voluntary. At oral argument in the case, the state characterized the deal not as a nonprosecution agreement, but instead as a “not prosecute you today agreement.”

The Supreme Court disagreed. Justice Rochford wrote that it “defies credulity” to believe that Mr. Smollett would have agreed to forfeit $10,000 with the understanding that prosecutors could simply refile charges against him the following day. “The State is bound by the agreement,” she wrote in the opinion.

The decision — in which four other justices concurred and two did not participate — cited the reasoning in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that overturned Bill Cosby’s conviction on sexual assault charges and resulted in him being freed from prison in 2021. In that case, the court ruled that a non-prosecution agreement with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case.

In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Webb said his office disagreed with the court’s reasoning and noted that the decision had “nothing to do” with Mr. Smollett’s culpability.

“Most importantly, it does not clear Jussie Smollett’s name — he is not innocent,” Mr. Webb said.

At Mr. Smollett’s sentencing, Judge James B. Linn, who oversaw his trial, excoriated him from the bench, saying he had carried out a hoax because he “craved the attention,” and that it had undermined victims of real hate crimes. His sentence included more than $120,000 in restitution for the cost of Chicago’s police investigation of his case.

But Mr. Smollett defiantly stood up and declared, “I did not do this.”

There remains an ongoing civil suit against Mr. Smollett that was filed by the city of Chicago, which is seeking more than $130,000 to cover the cost of the police investigation. The suit was put on pause during the criminal case and the appeal.

In Chicago, the case became particularly potent, and the decision to initially drop the charges divided public officials. It led to criticism of Kim Foxx, the county’s top prosecutor, who separated herself from the investigation and appointed a deputy to oversee it after disclosing that she had communicated with Mr. Smollett’s representatives when he was still considered a victim. In its investigation of her office’s handling of the case, Mr. Webb’s team found that her office did not break the law but said it had abused its discretion in deciding to drop the charges.

In an telephone interview on Thursday, Ms. Foxx, who will leave office in less than two weeks after declining to run for re-election, said the decision made her question “how much money have we wasted over five years for a low-level nonviolent offense.”

Mr. Smollett’s lawyers have long argued that their client was targeted in part because of his celebrity status. Mr. Smollett has not been embraced in mainstream Hollywood since he was written off “Empire” amid the scandal, but since his release from jail, he has directed and starred in an independent movie and released new music.

Nenye Uche, a lawyer for Mr. Smollett who led his defense at trial, celebrated the ruling that kept his client out of jail, saying at a news conference on Thursday that his client was grateful for the decision and that this chapter was “closed behind him.”

“He just wants to move on with his life,” he said.

Annie Aguiar contributed reporting.