A jury convicted actor Jussie Smollett of felony disorderly conduct for staging a fake hate crime.
“Smollett said two men punched him, kicked him, used racist and homophobic slurs, threw chemicals in his face, wrapped rope around his neck and even yelled out a slogan in support of then-President Donald Trump,” NBC News says.
After investigating the incident, which involved 26 officers and consumed 3,000 man-hours, Chicago police concluded it was a hoax. Two Nigerian brothers who Smollett claimed attacked him told investigators he recruited them. Smollett’s defense attorneys denied that, called them liars, and told the jury the attack was real and an extortion motive was behind it. The jury didn’t believe that.
Smollett had a prior history of lying to police. In 2007, when stopped for DUI in Los Angeles, he gave the cop a fake name and signed his brother’s name on the court summons (details here). That doesn’t make him the most believable person on the block.
Let’s say the jury is right and Smollett is guilty. (Note that “guilty” and guilty are two different things.) But let’s hedge this a little, because we know juries sometimes convict innocent people. In fact, it happens a lot, especially to black defendants, and Smollett is black. So let’s say that based on the jury verdict, he’s presumably guilty. And based on the evidence, he’s arguably guilty.
Ammon Bundy is plainly, inarguably, guilty of taking over a federal wildlife refuge (details here). He held press conferences and flaunted his defiance of federal authorities on television. There are numerous photos and videos of him at the crime scene, committing the crimes for which he was indicted. Eleven of his co-defendants pleaded guilty. Bundy, who’s white, was acquitted by an all-white jury (details here) — which must have made those who pleaded guilty feel like fools. (N.B., they are fools, but not just for that reason.)
Kyle Rittenhouse is plainly, inarguably, guilty of taking a gun to a riot, killing two unarmed people, and wounding a third person. He, too, is white, and he had a mostly-white jury (only one of 20 seated jurors was non-white, see article here). His acquittal is widely seen in the black community as more evidence of a racially-biased criminal justice system (see, e.g., article here).
If Smollett is guilty, he did something very damaging to black people: By staging a fake hate crime, he undermined society’s willingness to take real hate crimes seriously. Now, there’s now a cloud hanging over every reported hate crime: Police and public will wonder, “Is he lying and faking, like Jussie Smollett did?”
But this much is clear: There are conflicting stories in Smollett’s case, and the truth isn’t clear, but the legal system has decided he’s guilty. Meanwhile, in the Bundy and Rittenhouse cases, where there was no such ambiguity, the legal system found both of them innocent.
To many people, the clearest and most obvious difference is that Smollett is black while Bundy and Rittenhouse are white (and their juries were white). Regardless of whether or not this is a valid way of looking at these cases, or a valid explanation of the different verdicts, it’s what people see and many believe, and that’s a problem for our criminal justice system.
Related story: Read about Biden’s reaction to the guilty verdict here.
