Convicted hate hoaxer Jussie Smollett is still trying to claim that he is innocent. His lawyers have just filed a motion asking a Chicago judge to throw out his guilty verdict, or grant him a new trial.
Lawyers for the disgraced actor are attempting to throw out his conviction by arguing that his constitutional rights were violated by the court during the jury selection process.
According to a filing obtained by the New York Post, Smollett’s legal counsel are claiming that the court made several errors during the 2021 trial, referring to it as “a lightning rod for the political divisions plaguing the country.”
In their legal motion, the attorney’s are arguing that his right to a public trial was violated because of COVID restrictions.
The number of spectators and reporters allowed to observe the trial was limited thanks to the pandemic. Apparently, the disgraced actor couldn’t perform well enough without an audience.
The legal motion also alleges that the court endorsed “procedures and tactics” that allowed the prosecutors to exclude black and gay potential jurors. Apparently, Jussie — who is both black and gay — thinks that jurors who have the same race and sexual orientation as him would have believed his story rather than believing the mountain of evidence stacked against him.
“The State failed to prove the Defendant guilty of the charges against him beyond all reasonable doubt and failed to prove every material allegation of the indictment beyond all reasonable doubt,” attorney Mark Lewis wrote.
The hate hoaxer was found guilty in December 2021 of staging a hate crime after he claimed that two pro-Trump racists/homophobes recognized the obscure actor and attacked him in the early morning hours when he decided to go out to get a Subway sandwich, during ‘polar vortex’ weather, in Chicago in January 2019.
During the investigation and the trial, Smollett’s story did not hold up. As The Post Millennial writes: “Among other things, a Subway sandwich he was carrying with him at the time he claimed to have been assaulted somehow made it back home intact afterwards.”
Following the trial, Smollett’s lead attorney announced plans to appeal the conviction, saying that the actor is “100 percent confident” he will be cleared by an appeals court.
After the Chicago Police Department spent thousands of hours investigating Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax while actual crime in Chicago is spiking, he is now being sued by the city for over $130,000 for the time spent.
