by Jonathan Turley
In his testimony before a Chicago jury this week, actor Jussie Smollett talked about how he has had to carefully maintain his image as “a black Cary Grant.” The “Empire” star, however, seemed more like a modern version of Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny,” a delusional witness lashing out at every other witness as “scoffing at me, spreading wild rumors.”
Many have marveled at the audacity of Smollett, who literally is asking jurors to discard not just every piece of material evidence, videotape and eyewitness testimony but to defy any semblance of logic in accepting his account of a racist attack by Trump supporters. That’s because he is not really trying to convince anyone he didn’t stage the attack with the help of Nigerian brothers Abimbola and Olabingo Osundairo. He is trying to get the jury to vote for him despite his guilt. It is called jury nullification, and this may be the most raw example of the practice in decades. Even if he can get a single holdout juror, he has a hung jury.
After all, Smollett followed a similar strategy successfully in the media for months. He knew that “facts” are whatever people want them to be. Some of us expressed skepticism over Smollett’s initial account: two Trump supporters coming upon him around 2 a.m. in Chicago on a freezing night in January 2019, and then allegedly beating him, putting a noose around his neck, pouring a chemical on him and declaring — perhaps for the first time in history — that Chicago is “MAGA country.” Making this even more bizarre was that the spontaneous attack occurred shortly after Smollett was the target of a racist letter threatening to lynch him — a letter that prosecutors believe he wrote.
None of that mattered, though, because Smollett knew his audience. Vice President Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator, denounced what happened as an “attempted modern-day lynching.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said it was a “homophobic attack and an affront to our humanity.” In a fawning interview, ABC’s Robin Roberts described Smollett as “bruised but not broken” and breathlessly concluded the segment with “Beautiful, thank you, Jussie.”
Even when evidence mounted that this was a hoax, some media figures lashed out at Smollett’s doubters. ABC’s “The Talk” host Sara Gilbert was irate: “I find so personally offensive that a gay Black man is targeted and then suddenly he becomes the victim of people’s disbelief.”
Smollett’s attack was simply one of those “facts too good to check.” It made more sense to assume there are roaming bands of MAGA-hatted Trump supporters attacking Black people on Chicago’s streets.
In a courtroom, such willful blindness is supposed to yield to objective evidence. However, that is where jury nullification comes in. Georgetown law professor and MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler has been a long-standing advocate of Black jurors engaging in jury nullification in some cases involving Black defendants. Butler wrote in the Washington Post in 2016: “Confronting the racial crisis in criminal justice, jury nullification gives jurors a special power to send the message that black lives matter.”
Jury nullification is not an act of willful blindness. Rather, it is an act of willful disregard of the evidence. It occurs when jurors acquit regardless of the evidence of guilt. It is not that they don’t see or understand the evidence; they simply choose the individual over the evidence.
Lawyers usually cannot expressly ask jurors to disregard the evidence of a case in contradiction to the judge’s instructions. But they can make the case for nullification in not-so-subtle ways. In Smollett’s case, the defendant talked about his mistrust of the police and openly accused the prosecutor of misrepresenting facts to the jury. In front of the jury, he declared: “I’m a Black man in America and I do not trust police.”
Smollett was curt on cross examination, insisting that the two Nigerian brothers (one of whom he said was once his lover), the Chicago police, the prosecutors and others all sought to frame him. Smollett even chastised prosecutor Dan Webb for reading from Smollett’s Instagram messages, which included the N-word; Smollett told Webb to spell or abbreviate the word so as not to offend “every African American in this room.”
There have been historical uses of jury nullification to resist government abuse, including racist prosecutions. One of the first such instances was the acquittal in 1735 of publisher John Peter Zenger, who printed seditious libels against abusive colonial governor William Cosby.
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However, jury nullification can have a darker side, when jurors refuse to convict people because they agree with a crime, including possible hate crimes. That was the argument once made implicitly to some white Southern jurors in the early to mid-20th century to disregard crimes committed against African Americans, even murder.
The Smollett defense is a classic plea for nullification, which is why it seems so bizarre to most people weighing the evidence. The trial becomes a struggle over perceptions rather than proof. Even Smollett’s lawyers claimed to be victims in the courtroom. Defense attorney Tamara Walker demanded a mistrial in a sidebar conversation with attorneys from both sides and Cook County Judge James Linn. Walker reportedly broke into tears after accusing the judge of lunging at her in the courtroom and making faces from the bench.
Already, it is all but illegal for a cop to defend himself against a black assailant. God help the cop that misinterprets movements or actions and employs deadly force by mistake. It is becoming the rule of thumb that black criminals are simply not to be arrested or impeded.
So now, this is supposed to extend to the courtroom where the fact that a black person is on trial is wrong. No matter what the evidence is (and there is NO evidence Smollett ever uttered a truthful word in this case), a black person implanted on the jury should obstruct justice and cause a mistrial.
Kamala, Pelosi and the others are victims of their own culture. They’ve made it racist to doubt a black accuser, just as it is misogynistic to doubt any woman making a sexual assault accusation. Of course, it doesn’t damage them to make themselves look stupid; who expects anything else?
I remember one of the jurors on the Zimmerman case, a black lady, stating that while she personally believed Zimmerman to be guilty (the verdict reached in the court of leftist public opinion), the evidence simply didn’t support that, so she had to vote to acquit. THAT’S the way citizens are supposed to behave.
I love that reading Smollett’s own texts out loud is considered an “insult” to black people. If that was true, why did he even TEXT the N-word? Racists are so utterly stupid.
What you do not understand is that the word is only “an insult” when used by non Blacks. They use it amongst themselves all the time. I’ve been aware of that fact for over half a century. Among themselves Blacks use the “N” word as liberally an any Marine ever used “f**k” – perhaps more so! They can call themselves whatever they please but let someone else use a word – any word – they don’t like and they get their noses totally out of joint. But then like all good leftists they raise hypocrisy to new heights.
Like rap “music”. The woke left will ban “Baby It’s Cold Outside” while turning a blind eye (and deaf ear) to the misogynistic, violent and racist lyrics of rap “songs”. I’m not sure they are aware of the concept of hypocrisy.
Many activist groups have targeted the popular winter classic “Baby It’s Cold Outside” as an artifact of rape culture, citing lyrics that hint at a date rape.
As a result, many radio stations have banned the song and replaced it in on popular rotations with the rap classic, “DaMn, Bit¢h It FreeZin!” by Lil Wayne and Beyonce.
“‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ is literally rape-culture propaganda,” Debbie Foret of Womyn Against All Art Acceptance (WAAAA) said. “We’re much better off listening to popular hip-hops about actual domestic violence and rape than that oppressive song.”
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” has been criticized for its lyrics in which a man tries to convince a woman to stay at his place longer for fear that she’ll catch pneumonia out in the blizzard and die.
“DaMn, Bit¢h It FreeZin!” on the other hand contains detailed lyrics of an actual rape, but since it is sung by minorities, it’s okay according to the activists.
“And,” Foret added, “‘Baby’ was written by a white male! How rapey can you get?”
Genesius Times
CHICAGO, IL—Smollett has been detained after his conviction pending his sentencing hearing. But he’s already run into trouble, immediately claiming that two prison guards wearing MAGA hats attacked him while shouting “This is MAGA country!”
“I have been assaulted and attacked and I feared for my life,” Smollett said in a statement. “I was minding my own business making a license plate for Kamala Harris and they came up to me wearing their red caps of hate. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.”
According to Smollett, the prison guards pushed him up against the wall and started beating him, telling him to “get out of here” and shouting “this is MAGA country” while repeatedly pummeling him.
“I barely escaped with my life,” he said, tears in his eyes.
It was later revealed that the two prison guards were actually two Nigerians and that Jussie isn’t in prison yet.
The Bee