SMOLLETT GUILTY OF RACE HATE CRIME “HOAX”
—Ace
I put “hoax” in quotes because this was an actual hate crime.
His goal was to increase hatred against a race, and to increase violent attacks against them.
The law has intensifiers and additional penalties for hate crimes. Those intensifiers and additional penalties should be applied to cases of false reports of hate crimes, too.
Jussie Smollett was convicted Thursday of staging a hate crime nearly three years after he claimed two Trump-loving bigots beat him up, tied a noose around his neck and doused him in bleach in a misbegotten bid to raise his public profile.
It took nearly an hour for the actor to return to Chicago courthouse to hear the jury’s guilty verdict.
I hope he goes to prison, and I hope prison is MAGA Country.
Via FenelonSpoke, Legal Insurrection has the verdicts charge-by-charge.
Count 1 accuses him of telling responding Chicago Police Officer Muhammed Baig at around 2:45 a.m. — some 45 minutes after the purported attack — that he’d been the victim of a hate crime. He said two attackers put a rope around his neck. GUILTY
Count 2 refers to Smollett telling the same officer he was a victim of a battery, describing attackers beating and pouring bleach on him. GUILTY
Counts 3 and 4 are when Smollett made the same claims but to a different officer, Kimberly Murray, later that morning — at just before 6 a.m. GUILTY
Count 5 accuses Smollett of again telling Murray at around 7:15 p.m. that he was the victim of a battery. GUILTY
Count 6 refers to Smollett reporting on Feb. 14, 2019, to detective Robert Graves that he’d been a victim of an aggravated battery. NOT GUILTY
