"Your honour, I respect you and I respect the jury, but I didn't do this. I am innocent and I'm not suicidal. If anything happens to me when I go there, I did not do it to myself and you must all know that", Smollett said addressing the court.
"I don't want people to think, well, is he going crazy? Why is he yelling 'I'm not suicidal'? He was doing it for a specific reason because, let's be honest, we have the Epstein situation, where he was found dead in his jail even in protective custody. I cannot blame him because I have sued a lot of jails for unexplained deaths", Nenye Uche said.
The New York City Medical Examiner's Office concluded that the financier hanged himself. Yet, a forensic pathologist hired by his family suggested that evidence pointed to the financier potentially having been strangled.
Prior to his death the billionaire was put on suicide watch after a first botched attempt to take his own life, but several days later was taken off of it. A subsequent investigation revealed that the prison guards responsible for checking on him were reportedly sleeping and browsing the internet and the video of his first suicide attempt was deleted due to a technical error.
Police detained the perpetrators, who also turned out to be Black. Later, it became known that they had worked as extras on the set of the musical drama "Empire", where Smollet starred, and that one of them was gay. The men told the police that the actor actually paid them to stage a crime in order to promote his career.
Aside from a jail sentence, the 39-year-old paid over $120,000 in restitution to the city of Chicago and $25,000 in fines. Prosecutors said police spent over 3,000 hours investigating the purported hate crime and had interviewed dozens of witnesses, walking door-to-door during Chicago's Polar Vortex, one of the coldest period in the city's history.
"There is nothing that I can do here today that can come close to the damage you've already done to your own life. You're just a charlatan pretending to be a victim of a hate crime, and that's shameful", Judge James Linn said announcing the verdict.