Jussie Smollett’s conviction in 2019 attack on himself is overturned

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday overturned actor Jussie Smollett’s conviction on charges of staging a racist and homophobic attack against himself in 2019 and lying to Chicago police, saying he should not have been charged a second time after reaching a deal with prosecutors.

The ruling, which did not address Smollett's continued claims of innocence, was the latest twist in a yearslong saga. Smollett, who is Black and gay, made headlines around the world after he told police in January 2019 that two men assaulted him in his downtown Chicago neighborhood, spouting slurs, tossing a noose around his neck, and yelling that he was in “MAGA country,” an apparent reference to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” presidential campaign slogan. The report prompted a massive search for suspects by Chicago police before investigators announced that they believed the attack was a hoax.

The state's highest court found that a special prosecutor should not have been allowed to intervene after Smollett reached a deal with the Cook County state’s attorney in which charges against him were dropped in exchange for him forfeiting his $10,000 bond and performing community service. The deal prompted outrage in part because it did not include any condition that Smollett apologize or admit he staged the attack.

“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 Elizabeth Rochford wrote in the court’s 5-0 opinion. “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.”

Smollett was on the television drama “Empire,” which filmed in Chicago, and prosecutors alleged he staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio’s response to hate mail he received. Testimony at trial indicated he paid $3,500 to two men whom he knew from “Empire” to carry it out. Smollett testified that “there was no hoax” and that he was the victim of a hate crime.

Smollett declined to comment Thursday through a publicist. His attorney, Nenye Uche, said Smollett was happy and relieved but also disappointed to have been "dragged through an unfair process.”

"Even though this is over now and Jussie just absolutely wants to move his life forward, people should start asking questions. How did this happen? Why should this even happen? What can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?" Uche said at a news conference in Chicago.

The special prosecutor, former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb, said he disagreed with the court’s ruling while noting that it “has nothing to do with Mr. Smollett’s innocence.”

“The Illinois Supreme Court did not find any error with the overwhelming evidence presented at trial that Mr. Smollett orchestrated a fake hate crime and reported it to the Chicago Police Department as a real hate crime, or the jury’s unanimous verdict that Mr. Smollett was guilty of five counts of felony disorderly conduct,” Webb said.

After Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx's office dropped the initial 16 counts of disorderly conduct, the backlash was swift, with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel calling it “a whitewash of justice.” Webb was appointed special prosecutor and a grand jury restored charges, leading to Smollett's 2021 conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct.

Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in jail — six of which he served before he was freed pending appeal — and was ordered to pay about $130,000 in restitution. Chicago officials are pursuing reimbursement for that amount in police overtime through a civil case.

Foxx told The Associated Press that she was not surprised that the high court found her handling of the case “proper — if unpopular, proper.” She criticized Webb's ensuing “legal machinations,” which she said ignored the tenet of prosecutorial discretion and landed the issue in the “same position we were in in March 2019."

“What they were doing in going to the court to re-prosecute someone because you didn’t like the outcome would have set a horrendous precedent, in which anyone could come in and undermine the work of a prosecutor’s office," said Foxx, who did not seek a third term this year.

Eileen O’Neill Burke, the incoming Cook County state's attorney, declined to comment.

Smollett, a child actor who appeared in 1992 movie “The Mighty Ducks,” has credited his role as a singer on the hip-hop drama “Empire” for turbocharging his career. This year, he starred in the movie “The Lost Holliday” with Vivica A. Fox.

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis and Justice Joy Cunningham took no part in Thursday’s decision.

Tareen reported from Chicago.

Jussie Smollett's lead defense attorney Nenye Uche speaks to reporters during a news conference Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, In Chicago, after the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Smollett's conviction on charges of staging a racist and homophobic attack against himself in 2019 and lying to Chicago police. (Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

Jussie Smollett's lead defense attorney Nenye Uche speaks to reporters during a news conference Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, In Chicago, after the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Smollett's conviction on charges of staging a racist and homophobic attack against himself in 2019 and lying to Chicago police. (Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

Jussie Smollett's lead defense attorney Nenye Uche speaks to reporters during a news conference Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, In Chicago, after the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Smollett's conviction on charges of staging a racist and homophobic attack against himself in 2019 and lying to Chicago police. (Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

Jussie Smollett's lead defense attorney Nenye Uche speaks to reporters during a news conference Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, In Chicago, after the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Smollett's conviction on charges of staging a racist and homophobic attack against himself in 2019 and lying to Chicago police. (Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

FILE - Jussie Smollett arrives at the BET Awards, June 26, 2022, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama inmate convicted of the 1994 murder of a female hitchhiker was scheduled to become the third person in the nation executed using nitrogen gas on Thursday evening.

Carey Dale Grayson, now 50, was one of four teens convicted of killing Vickie Deblieux, 37, who was hitchhiking through Alabama on her way to her mother’s home in Louisiana. Grayson's execution was set to be carried out after 6 p.m. local time at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in south Alabama.

Alabama this year began using nitrogen gas to carry out some death sentences, the first use of a new execution method in the U.S. since lethal injection was introduced in 1982. The method involves placing a respirator gas mask over the person’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death by lack of oxygen.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday morning turned down Grayson's request for a stay. No other appeals were pending.

Alabama maintains the method is constitutional. But critics — citing how the first two people executed shook for several minutes — say the method needs more scrutiny, particularly if other states follow Alabama’s path.

“The normalization of gas suffocation as an execution method is deeply troubling,” said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action, a group seeking to stop executions and abolish the death penalty.

Deblieux’s mutilated body was found at the bottom of a bluff near Odenville, Alabama, on Feb. 26, 1994. Prosecutors said Deblieux was hitchhiking from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to her mother’s home in West Monroe, Louisiana, when four teens offered her a ride. Prosecutors said the teens took her to a wooded area and attacked and beat her. They threw her off a cliff and later returned to mutilate her body.

A medical examiner testified that Deblieux’s face was so fractured that she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine. Her fingers had also been severed. Investigators said the four teens were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend a severed finger and boasted about the killing.

Grayson is the only one of the four facing a death sentence since the others were under 18 at the time of the killing. Grayson was 19. Two of the teens were initially sentenced to death but those sentences were set aside when the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crimes. Another teen involved in Deblieux’s killing was sentenced to life in prison.

In the hours ahead of his execution, Grayson visited with his attorneys. He also requested a seafood platter and tacos and burritos for a meal, food brought in from restaurants near the prison.

Grayson’s final appeals focused on the call for more scrutiny of the new execution method. They argued that the person experiences “conscious suffocation” and that the first two nitrogen executions did not result in swift unconsciousness and death as the state promised.

“Given this is the first new execution method used in the United States since lethal injection was first used in 1982, it is appropriate for this Court to reach the issues surrounding this novel method,” Grayson’s attorneys wrote. His attorneys on Thursday morning filed a separate emergency motion with a federal judge asking that he be allowed to take a sedative before the execution to help with his fear. However, they later withdrew the motion.

Lawyers for the Alabama attorney general’s office asked justices to let the execution go forward, saying a lower court found Grayson’s claims speculative.

The state lawyers wrote that Alabama’s “nitrogen hypoxia protocol has been successfully used twice, and both times it resulted in a death within a matter of minutes.”

A demonstrator holds a sign during a protest outside the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Monday, Nov. 18, 2024, against a scheduled execution in Alabama using nitrogen gas. (Kim Chandler/Associated Press)

Abe Bonowitz of Death Penalty Action leads a outside the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Monday, Nov. 18, 2024, against a scheduled execution in Alabama using nitrogen gas. (Kim Chandler/Associated Press)