Throughout the Jussie Smollett trial, the consensus among experts has been that he will get a light sentence but one CNN analyst disagrees, arguing that the disgraced actor’s abysmal testimony may lead to some jail time.
On Thursday, a jury convicted disgraced actor Jussie Smollett for five counts of felony disorderly conduct for filing a false police report after he hired two brothers from Nigeria to stage a fake hate crime against him. The class 4 felony carries a maximum sentence of up to 3 years in prison and a $25,000 fine for each count, though experts believe he will likely get probation and be sentenced to community service. CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson said that jail time could be on the table for Smollett, arguing that his testimony exposed his lies and fabrication.
“When you testify in a case, the judge now gets a sense of what you said,” Jackson told CNN. “What Jussie Smollett said was resoundingly rejected by that jury. The jury did not buy what he was selling. That’s not lost upon a judge. You came into the courtroom and fabricated.”
Former federal prosecutor Laura Coates agreed with Jackson that the defense made a serious mistake by having Smollett take the stand.
“So him taking the stand lead to his exposure in the way Joey has spoken about,” Coates said. “A judge is now looking at you, taking everything you had to say and assessing it.”
The actor’s attorney said on Thursday that they will appeal the case, saying that “justice will prevail” in the end.
“He [Smollett] is 100% confident that this will be reversed on appeal,” attorney Nenye Uche said. “At the end of the day, we believe justice will prevail. We don’t believe it was done today but we’re very confident that he will be cleared and he will be found to be innocent.”
Smollett’s testimony made headlines for some of his wild accusations against the Osundairo brothers – the Nigerians he hired to stage the hoax hate crime – alleging that attacked him on a cold winter’s Chicago night and then demanded $1 million for them not to testify.
Among other things, Smollett also characterized Abimbola Osundairo as a jilted gay lover who grew jealous of his success on the show Empire after the two carried on a drugged-fueled sexual affair.
“We were in a club, you go to the bathroom, go to a stall, do a bump, do a bump and then just kind of keep going in and then we went to the bathhouse,” Smollet said on the stand.
At one point, Smollett even snapped at the prosecutor for reading his text messages that contained the N-word aloud in the courtroom, pleading with him to stop “out of respect for every African American in the courtroom.”
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