Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has been subpoenaed to appear in court over the Jussie Smollett case, according to The Chicago Sun-Times. Retired appellate judge Sheila O’Brien also filed a subpoena against the prosecutor’s deputy, first assistant state attorney Joseph Magats, and asks that Smollett come to the hearing.
O’Brien is petitioning for a special prosecutor to look into how Foxx handled the Smollett case. From an April 1 opinion piece in The Chicago Tribune:
We deserve answers. We deserve open court files. We deserve transparency in every case.
We deserve a state’s attorney who will treat the rich and the poor the same — not someone who will make decisions based upon who calls on the phone about it. Did our state’s attorney really remove herself from this case? We have a right to know.
We deserve a state’s attorney who will ask for full restitution for the money spent on cases — not someone who will waste our tax dollars.
Smollett claimed in January that two men attacked him in a racist, homophobic assault. (The actor is black and gay.) Police said they treated him as a victim at first, but said they found evidence that Smollett recruited two brothers to help stage the assault. The actor denied the allegation.
Foxx said she recused herself from the case. Text messages showed that she was still commenting on it.
“Sooo… I am recused, but when people accuse us of overcharging cases… 16 counts on a class 4 [felony] becomes exhibit A,” she wrote Magats, according to NPR.
Prosecutors dropped the charges against Smollett last month, and this caught some people by surprise. The actor was to do community service, and forfeit his $10,000 bond to the city. Magats told WLS that this wasn’t an exoneration.
“We believe he did what he was charged with doing,” he said.
[Image via Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images]
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