This Wasn’t About Jussie Smollett

Courtroom sketch of Jussie Smollett. Illustration: Cheryl Cook/AP/Shutterstock For almost three years, it has been clear that any prosecutor who wanted to convict Jussie Smollett of a crime could probably do it. “We believe he did what he was charged with doing,” said Joe Magats of the Cook County, Illinois, state’s attorney’s office in March 2019. The decision to drop felony charges against the actor, Magats emphasized, was “not an exoneration.

Anita Alvarez, the Cook County state’s attorney at the time the segment aired, stood by the police’s tactics. There were “all kinds of possibilities out there, and what I’m saying is that I don’t know what happened,” she told 60 Minutes. When asked about new DNA testing that implicated other men in the crimes, Alvarez said someone else might have ejaculated inside the corpse after the teens had dumped it.

Kim Foxx, who ran against Alvarez in the 2016 Democratic primary, offered an alternative that was as simple as it was unfamiliar. She would aggressively prosecute police abuses, she promised, while civilians in Cook County would be charged according to new standards of public safety. Low-level and nonviolent offenses would be deprioritized in favor of violent felonies; some crimes wouldn’t be prosecuted at all.

By January 2019, Foxx had made good on many of her campaign promises and overseen dips in crime. An analysis by the Marshall Project that year found that her office had turned away 5,000 cases that her predecessor would’ve prosecuted, mostly concerning low-level shoplifting and drug offenses. Under her stated rubric, these people weren’t serious threats to public safety.

Foxx recused herself from the case, citing “familiarity” with potential witnesses . But after the outcry, she asked for an independent investigation into her office’s handling of it. A judge appointed a special prosecutor, who brought back the charges against Smollett after putting them to a grand jury. He also claimed Foxx had “abused” her discretion by dropping the charges and may have misled the public about why she had done so, which she denies.

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

Smollett deserved the book. But y’all hate the optics of it.

Smollett did not commit “low-level shoplifting or drug offense:” he committed horrible fraud on public & put genuine victims of hate crimes at risk. Piece is bizarre & non sequitur: everything said abt Chicago cops & pols is right but irrelevant: Smollett deserved to be charged.

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