The prosecutor, Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, wrote in The Chicago Tribune on Friday that she welcomed an “outside, nonpolitical review of how we handled this matter.”
The case involved Smollett, a star of the television show “Empire,” who claimed he was a victim of a hate crime in Chicago. Smollett, who is black and gay, told authorities he was attacked in January by two men who yelled homophobic and racial slurs at him, tied a rope around his neck and poured a chemical substance on him.
Nearly a month later, he was arrested by police, who maintained he had staged the assault and falsely reported it. Initially there was an outpouring of support for Smollett, but as the story turned, so did public sentiment. Smollett, who denied the allegations, was charged with 16 counts of disorderly conduct, but on Tuesday, the charges were dropped.
“Yes, falsely reporting a hate crime makes me angry, and anyone who does that deserves the community’s outrage,” Foxx wrote. “But, as I’ve said since before I was elected, we must separate the people at whom we are angry from the people of whom we are afraid.”
Foxx wrote that there were “specific aspects of the evidence and testimony presented” that made securing a conviction uncertain. She did not elaborate.
She also said Smollett was charged with a class 4 felony, which was on par with pulling a fire alarm at a school or “draft card mutilation.” Those kinds of charges are “routinely resolved, particularly in cases involving suspects with no prior criminal record, long before a case ever nears a courtroom and often without either jail time or monetary penalties,” she wrote.
The decision to drop the charges drew a sharp rebuke from the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, and the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who called the decision a “whitewash of justice.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.