Actor Jussie Smollett was released from jail following six nights behind bars after an appeals court agreed with his lawyers that he should be free pending an appeal of his conviction for falsely telling police that he was attacked.
The former Empire actor walked out of the Cook County Jail on Wednesday surrounded by security.
He did not comment as he got into a waiting vehicle, but his attorneys said that Smollett was the target of a racist justice system and people playing politics.
Photo: AFP
The appeals court ruling came after a Cook County judge last week sentenced Smollett to immediately begin serving 150 days in jail for his conviction on five felony counts of disorderly conduct for lying to police.
In an outburst immediately after the sentence was handed down, Smollett proclaimed his innocence and said: “I am not suicidal.”
“And if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself,” he said. “And you must all know that.”
The appeals court said that Smollett could be released after posting a personal recognizance bond of US$150,000, meaning he did not have to put down money, but agrees to come to court as required.
Smollett defense attorney Nenye Uche, speaking to reporters outside the jail after Smollett left, said that the Smollett family is “very, very happy with today’s developments.”
Uche said during his time at the jail, Smollett had not eaten and drank only water, although he did not say why.
He criticized the special prosecutor’s decision to charge Smollett again after the initial charges were dropped by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and he paid a fine.
He also called Judge James Linn’s sentence excessive for a low-level felony, adding that the appellate court does not “play politics.”
“The real question is: Should black men be walked into jail for a class 4 felony? Shame on you if you think they should,” Uche said.
During sentencing, special prosecutor Dan Webb recommended that Smollett serve “an appropriate amount of prison time.”
“His conduct denigrated hate crimes,” Webb said after the hearing. “His conduct will discourage others who are victims of hate crimes from coming forward and reporting those crimes to law enforcement.”
Smollett’s attorneys had argued that he would have completed the sentence by the time the appeal process was completed and that Smollett could be in danger of physical harm if he remained locked up in Cook County Jail.
The office of the special prosecutor called the claim that Smollett’s health and safety were at risk “factually incorrect,” in a response to his motion, adding that Smollett was being held in protective custody at the jail.
The court’s decision marks the latest chapter in a strange story that began in January 2019 when Smollett reported to Chicago police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two men wearing ski masks.
The hunt for the attackers soon turned into an investigation of Smollett himself, and his arrest on charges that he had orchestrated the attack and lied to police about it.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver