{"id":25153,"date":"2024-03-28T10:05:27","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T10:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=25153"},"modified":"2024-03-28T10:05:27","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T10:05:27","slug":"illinois-supreme-court-to-review-jussie-smolletts-appeal-of-convictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2024\/03\/28\/illinois-supreme-court-to-review-jussie-smolletts-appeal-of-convictions\/","title":{"rendered":"Illinois Supreme Court to Review Jussie Smollett&#8217;s Appeal of Convictions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>By Gabriella Ogbu<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Illinois Supreme Court has announced its decision to hear the appeal filed by former &#8216;Empire&#8217; star Jussie Smollett challenging his convictions. Smollett&#8217;s legal team argues that his Fifth Amendment rights against double jeopardy, which prohibits being punished twice for the same offense, were violated during his 2021 trial.<\/p>\n<p>The case stems from Smollett&#8217;s claims in 2019 that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack. However, a comprehensive investigation later revealed evidence suggesting that Smollett had orchestrated the incident himself. Subsequently, he faced 16 charges of disorderly conduct.<\/p>\n<p>In a controversial turn of events, Smollett reached an agreement with Cook County State&#8217;s Attorney Kim Foxx to have the charges dropped in exchange for a $10,000 bond and community service. Despite fulfilling these conditions, the case was reopened by a special prosecutor in 2020. The special prosecutor argued that part of the initial agreement included the expectation of restitution for the alleged offense.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, a grand jury reinstated the accusations against Smollett, leading to his conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct in 2021. He was ordered to pay $130,160 in restitution, placed on 30 months of probation, and sentenced to 150 days in jail. However, Smollett served only six days in prison before being released pending his\u00a0ongoing\u00a0appeal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Gabriella Ogbu The Illinois Supreme Court has announced its decision to hear the appeal filed by former &#8216;Empire&#8217; star Jussie Smollett challenging his convictions. Smollett&#8217;s legal team argues that his Fifth Amendment rights against double jeopardy, which prohibits being punished twice for the same offense, were violated during his 2021 trial. The case stems [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":25154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25155,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25153\/revisions\/25155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}