This doesn't even reach the level of any number of misdemeanor events involving wife-beating, drunk in public, shoplifting and reckless driving celebrities who were never charged. Frank Sinatra was famous for punching people. Mel Gibson has a long string of more serious public failures than Smollett's.

I'm starting to think that the fact that the guy is BLACKITY BLACK explains the right wing outrage over a minor crime that he must be presumed innocent of, until charged and proven guilty in a court of law.

I actually agree with McBain here, that we must reserve judgment until the facts are in, just as we would after viewing a YouTube video of a police officer gunning down an unarmed, fleeing black man who has been accused of a traffic offense.

The Right thinks this is a serious matter, while (my anecdotal survey indicates, based on Internet comments) the Left laughs at the Right for thinking that. So far I haven't found a single liberal who cares about this, other than the enjoyment of seeing Smollett "own the right."

The officer who shot him is the first Chicago police officer convicted of murder in decades. It was only the video that Emmanuel tried to suppress that put him in prison.

We need to purge the party of these detestable fake Democrats.

Claims that this influenced SA.

Foxx reached out to Johnson after Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama, emailed Foxx saying the actor's family had unspecified "concerns about the investigation." Tchen, a close friend of Mayor Emanuel's wife, said she was acting on behalf of the "Empire" actor and his family. A relative later exchanged texts with Foxx.

Joe Magats, the first assistant state's attorney who made the final decision to drop the charges against Jussie Smollett, says in an interview: "We didn't exonerate him."

Here's the thing -- we work to prioritize violent crime and the drivers of violent crime. Public safety is our number one priority. I don't see Jussie Smollett as a threat to public safety."

"We stand behind the investigation, we stand behind the decision to charge him and we stand behind the charges in the case. The mere fact that it was disposed of in an alternative manner does not mean that there were any problems or infirmities in the case or the evidence."

• Pay $109 & Take Defensive Driving
  
• Pay $209
  
• Pay $399 & have the ticket removed off your record (deferred adjudication)
  
• Set court date

We never had this option in Wisconsin.
I had a friend with a felony charge of possessing a dangerous drug(a couple Valium) in Texas.  He paid a couple grand I believe and received deferred adjudication and so long as he didn't get caught with drugs in the same city/county for 6 months it would totally disappear off his record.

How is this not bribery, people with means gets crimes removed form their records.  I know it's common, and obviously if I ever had the change outside of a traffic ticket, I would use it, but it just doesn't seem right.

The abrupt end of the Jussie Smollett prosecution was the "straw that broke the camel's back" for a group of suburban police chiefs set to gather Thursday afternoon with members of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police to announce a "no confidence" vote in the leadership of Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx.

Brian Michael Rini told investigators in Kentucky on Wednesday that he was Pitzen and had run across an Ohio bridge after escaping two kidnappers. But DNA tests indicated that the man was not the boy who vanished eight years ago, officials said Thursday.

Let's start with the facts. In 1994, an American teenager named Nicholas Barclay disappeared after playing basketball with his friends in San Antonio. He was presumed murdered, but his body was never found. Authorities gave up. His family grieved. Then, less than three years later, the Barclay family got a phone call that their son had turned up, lost and scared, in the middle of Spain. The family welcomed him back without hesitation, but other people noticed that something was not quite right. Not right at all. The Nicholas Barclay of 1994 was a blue-eyed and blonde-haired kid who lived his entire life in Texas. The Nicholas who returns in 1997 has brown eyes, obviously dyed hair, and a French accent. How can the family not recognize the obvious imposter?