Juicy Smollyay Trial - Guilty On 5 Of 6 Charges In Hoax MAGA Racial Attack

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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.

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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.

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