Mr. Webb has pointed in several settings to the social damage caused by faking a hate crime, about the waste of police resources spent on the case and about the consequences of lying to a jury, which found Mr. Smollett guilty after he spent seven hours on the witness stand standing by his account.
The judge will certainly consider Mr. Smollett’s prior criminal infraction, though it was 14 years ago and relatively minor.
In this instance, it was Mr. Smollett who reported a crime, an attack by two assailants who he said beat him up, yelled racist and homophobic slurs at him, placed a rope around his neck and poured bleach on his clothing in an early morning assault on a frigid day in 2019.
A staged hate crime? In 2019, Jussie Smollett, an actor from the show “Empire,” told police he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in downtown Chicago.
Others involved.
In it, Smollett discussed needing help and meeting “on the low.” Security camera footage shows Mr. Smollett’s black Mercedes pulling up in an alley behind one of the brothers’ homes that afternoon.
The office had agreed to a plan where Mr. Smollett would do community service and forfeit the $10,000 bond paid for his release, in exchange for the office dropping the charges, with no admission of guilt.
Webb, announced that a grand jury had revived the case with a new indictment, and he criticized the earlier decision to drop the case.
In addition to his sentencing, Mr. Smollett will soon have to contend with a lawsuit against him by the City of Chicago.
In a news conference on Friday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, noted that former President Donald J.