I'm all about restorative justice so if Smollett pays back the $183,000 spent on the investigation of his fake attack, i'd consider that renumertation enough to forgive him, and we as a society can look back on this as "that super cringey thing he did one time".
It's not like he came onto a 14 y/o kid like Spacey. And Mark Whalberg attacked minorities at random when he was young and beat Vietnamese men (in unproked, random attacks) so badly that one lost an eye, and he still gets to be in Transformers and shit? Surely Smollet's crime is more forgivable? Can't we just let him cop this and just move on with his life?