On Wednesday, attorneys for actor Jussie Smollett filed their appeal of his conviction to keep him from having to go back to the slammer on hate crime hoax charges.
As we previously reported, On March 10, 2022, Smollett was taken into custody after being found guilty of felony disorderly conduct for staging a fake hate crime in 2019. He was released from jail after serving just six days of his 150-day sentence.
In documents obtained by Fox News Digital, Smollett’s legal team details their argument against the actor’s hate crime hoax conviction. They say his “renewed prosecution” violated Smollet’s due process rights. His legal team also says a “circuit court judge improperly denied the defense motion for substitution of judge for cause because of his explicit bias towards Mr. Smollett, rendering every subsequent ruling and action in this case null and void.”
In addition to that, the appeal brief also stated Jussie’s due process rights were violated during the trial when the court allegedly made “uninvited commentary that was dismissive of lines of defense questioning that had sought to establish homophobia, a central theory of the defense case; made commentary defending a detective’s investigative decision during cross-examination; accused one of the defense counsel’s without basis, of editorializing during cross-examination; and made commentary that sought to hurry along parts of the defense cross-examination; all of which occurred in front of the jury.”
Furthermore, the appeal also stated Smollett’s “Fourteenth Amendment Rights to Due Process and Equal Protections under the law were violated when the trial court deprived Mr. Smollett of a jury of his peers by allowing the prosecution to strike all but one African American juror and a gay juror.”
His legal team has planned to appeal the verdict since the December 2021 trial. Since his release, they have been determined to keep him out of jail.
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More On What Happened On
As we previously reported, Smollett, who is Black and gay, made a reported to to Chicago police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack. He claimed that two men wearing ski masks brutally assaulted him in January 2019. Following an investigation, police made an arrest on charges that he’d orchestrated the attack and lied to police about it.
Smollett has always maintained that he is innocent even when he was found guilty. After sentencing he said, “I did not do this, and I am not suicidal, and if anything happens to me when I go there, I did not do it to myself, and you must all know that,” Smollett shouted as he was taken out of the hearing.
Smollett has remained out of jail since.
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