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What name does the Cook County state’s attorney least like to hear?

Easy. Jussie Smollett.

Kim Foxx hates to be linked to the television actor who everyone knows rigged up a phony racially charged attack on the streets of Chicago, all so he could get some publicity and negotiate for more money on the TV show, “Empire.” As Foxx has told us on several occasions, she views the massive media interest in the case as having been maddening, trivializing and even racist. She sees reporters as having constantly focused on the sweetheart deal Foxx arranged for the troubled star at the expense of focusing on what Foxx sees as her far more substantial achievements during her tenure.

Such is her hatred for the Smollett issue that she scared off most of the several journalists with whom she spoke as part of her exit media tour in recent days, not just declining to talk about the Smollett case in any detail but basically closing down the line of questioning. One of the strongest arguments in her favor when those interviews were conducted was that the Smollett case was old news, exhaustively covered in 2019 and in the months thereafter. Nothing new to say.

Until, like a Shakespearean ghost refusing to stay dead and in the ground, Smollett reappeared Thursday, grabbing international headlines again just as the state’s attorney was halfway out the door and consumed with burnishing her legacy.

The reason was a blockbuster ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court that Smollett should not have been prosecuted a second time for the same crime, given that he’d kept his side of a previously arranged deal with Foxx’s office the first time around.

To refresh your memory, following a call from former Obama aide Tina Tchen that reportedly aimed to connect, so to speak, Foxx with Smollett’s family, Foxx signed off on a fine and probation for Smollett. Most incredibly of all, the slap on the wrist did not require him to stand up in public and admit his guilt (Smollett always has maintained his innocence). At the time, that last detail astonished many in the criminal justice field, given that ordinary folks who find themselves in such negotiations almost always at least have to acknowledge what they did.

Such was the outrage that prominent Chicago attorney Dan Webb took over as special prosecutor and re-prosecuted Smollett in 2022. Surprising no one, a jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to five months in jail, a proportionally apt sentence in our view given that he had mocked the Chicago police officers who had rushed to investigate what they first believed to be a hate crime, wasting their time and efforts. Similarly, Smollett had made a fool out of every actual victim of a hate crime by making it less likely they would be believed in the future. And, of course, he had besmirched the entire city of Chicago, coming up with a cock-and-bull story about someone shouting, “This is MAGA country,” as if that were likely to happen in this town in the middle of a frigid winter night.

Lots of famous Democrats who should have been more cautious, such as Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi and, yes, Kamala Harris, issued statements of support for the hoaxer at the time. “This was an attempted modern day lynching,” said Harris on what was then Twitter.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The cops knew almost immediately, but none of the above politicians checked with them. Or waited even a few days for the facts to emerge.

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TV actor Jussie Smollett stands before Cook County Circuit Judge Steven Watkins on March 14, 2019, at the Leighton Criminal Court Building in Chicago, where he pleaded not guilty. (E. Jason Wambsgans/baiduhai)
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Much as we would have liked to see Smollett do his duly assigned time (he appealed and spent only a handful of days in jail) and then move on with his life, we have some sympathy with the Supreme Court’s verdict, which was a determination on the fairness (or lack thereof) of the prosecutorial process rather than a ruling on the actual facts of the case. The court clearly reasoned that Foxx’s office had kept the bond that Smollett had paid and he had, at least nominally, done the requisite 15 hours of so-called community service. Thus, the court decided the second prosecution constituted double jeopardy, and the jury’s verdict and Smollett’s sentence were in essence vacated.

As Webb noted in a statement Thursday, “Make no mistake — today’s ruling has nothing to do with Mr. Smollett’s innocence. The Illinois Supreme Court did not find any error with the overwhelming evidence presented at trial that Mr. Smollett orchestrated a fake hate crime and reported it to the Chicago Police Department as a real hate crime, or the jury’s unanimous verdict that Mr. Smollett was guilty of five counts of felony disorderly conduct.”

The lesson here?

Prosecutorial errors have consequences that even special prosecutors cannot undo.

We’ve long argued that this case was in fact highly relevant when assessing Foxx’s legacy because of its symbolic import, especially as it related to her office’s fraught relationship with the Chicago police. We also have long thought that, even though Foxx has denied it, here was a revealing case that suggested justice was not always equally dispensed if a celebrity was involved. That’s true of lots of other offices, of course, in this city and beyond, but that doesn’t make it right.

We long have acknowledged that prosecutors have limited resources and, given all the violent crimes in this city, this one was a candidate for a quick negotiation. This was fundamentally an act of narcissism by a clearly troubled young man and while there were victims, they were neither individualized not immediately obvious. Also, Foxx is right that this was one case among the very many that she and her staff dealt with during her tenure and it hardly represents the whole story. So stipulated.

But there is much poetic justice in the Smollett affair rearing its head again just as Foxx is about to be replaced by Eileen O’Neill Burke. Foxx and Smollett are tied together whether the state’s attorney likes it or not, and this case was not the office’s finest hour under her leadership.

Finally, and let’s hope this is the last time we say it, whatever deal Foxx wanted cooked up for Smollett should have been accompanied by his admitting guilt.

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