Jussie Smollett’s legal battle has reached a turning point.
Five years after the Empire actor was accused of falsely reporting a hate crime—for which he was sentenced to 150 daysin jail in 2022, serving only six, after being convicted of five counts of disorderly conduct—the Illinois Supreme Court has overturned his criminal conviction.
"Today we resolve a question about the State's responsibility to honor the agreements it makes with defendants,” the court wrote in its decision, as seen in documents obtained by E! News. “We hold that a second prosecution under these circumstances is a due process violation, and we therefore reverse defendant's conviction."
Ultimately, the state high court ruled that Smollett should not have been charged after he entered a non-prosecution agreement with the State Attorney’s Office in Cook County. The court also noted it has remanded the case back to the circuit court to enter a judgement of dismissal.
In the decision, the Supreme Court acknowledged the public interest Smollett’s case garnered, referencing a recent decision out of Pennsylvania which discussed the legal balance between public scrutiny and upholding a defendant’s rights.
“'It cannot be gainsaid that society holds a strong interest in the prosecution of crimes,'” the Illinois court’s decision quoted from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. “'It is also true that no such interest, however important, ever can eclipse society's interest in ensuring that the constitutional rights of the people are vindicated. Society's interest in prosecution does not displace the remedy due to constitutionally aggrieved persons.'”
The overturned conviction comes after an Illinois appellate court ruled against Smollett’s appeal in a 2-1 decision in Dec. 2023, at which time his legal team turned to the state’s Supreme Court.
At the time, Smollett’s legal team argued the actor was improperly charged with the same crime twice, and that the trial court was also "influenced by improper aggravating factors" when he received his sentence, ABC Chicago reported, citing Capitol News Illinois.
Additionally, his attorney Nunye Uche argued that Smollett’s previous agreement with the State’s Attorney Office—which would have seen the actor surrender his $10,000 bond and perform community service in return for not being prosecuted—should have prevented a trial in the first place, per NBC Chicago.
Since the controversy—which saw the 42-year-old accused of paying two brothers $3,500 to stage the hate crime, which he’s continuously denied—Smollett’s character was written off Empire, and he remained largely off of viewers’ screens until the release of The Lost Holliday in 2024 which he starred in alongside Vivica A. Fox.
And while he’s maintained a relatively low profile, Smollett did recently reflect on how the events have transpired–including the fallout from his arrest.
"That was a pretty dark day because that's when everything clicked to me of what was happening," he told People in September. "A lot of things tested my strength, a lot of things tested my mental, but the one thing I never lost—I never started thinking that I am somebody that I'm not."