Convicted rapist on trial for allegedly hiring hitman to kill Cook County judge, prosecutor

Jimmie Smith has pleaded guilty to the brutal, sadistic kidnapping and rape of two girls and two women.

He was charged for allegedly attacking his assistant public defender with a shank.

He has been busted for filming a talkshow in his jail cell using a smuggled laptop, and charged with punching a female guard in the face, and spraying another guard with a mixture of urine and feces.

But on witness stand Wednesday, Smith insisted that when he was arrested for allegedly plotting to have the Cook County judge and prosecutor in his rape cases killed, he was only trying to put over a scam on police and prosecutors.

The plan was complex Smith said: In the fall of 2014, fellow jail inmate Quinton Davis was facing a life sentence and needed to cut a favorable plea deal, while Smith wanted a new judge and prosecutor on his rape case. Davis offered to put $2,000 on Smith’s jail commissary account, if Smith agreed to playact an attempt to hire a hitman. Davis would snitch Smith out to police, giving Davis leverage to cut a better plea deal. Once the fake plot was “exposed,” the judge and prosecutor would have to recuse themselves from Smith’s case.

To Smith, who fancied himself a jailhouse lawyer — and one without enough money on his commissary account to afford a cup of noodles — it seemed like a solid plan.

“I was the fake Johnnie Cochran. I didn’t think I was going to get myself in trouble,” Smith said on the stand Wednesday during three hours of testimony.

Wearing a dark suit — and shackled at the wrists, ankles and waist — Smith laughed and smiled often during questioning by both his own lawyers and on cross-examination, sometimes drawing wry grins from spectators in the courtroom that included a half-dozen judges. Not smiling was Assistant State’s Attorney Jim Papa, whose wife, fellow prosecutor Michelle Papa, allegedly had been targeted by Smith..

Smith’s rape case indeed was transferred out of the Judge James Linn’s courtroom after the alleged murder-for-hire plot was revealed, though Smith pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault on the eve of trial in 2016, and was sentenced to 110 years. Smith in 2009 kidnapped his four victims, two of them 14 years old, from an Englewood home, and beat and raped them, allowing his pit bull to bite them. He held a gun to the head of one of the victims during games of Russian roulette.

Smith already had gotten a new lawyer, after he allegedly attacked his assistant public defender in a 2014 meeting at the jail. His subsequent court-appointed private lawyers later withdrew from the case, according to court records, apparently because they had reported to authorities that Smith made repeated threats against Michelle Papa.

The murder-for-hire case is being tried in front of DuPage County Judge Brian Telander, and private attorney Andrew Porter, a former federal prosecutor, is serving as special prosecutor.

Wednesday, Porter noted Smith’s sexual assault convictions, and that Smith had shouted profanity at Linn a week after telling the undercover officer he wanted the judge to have his “head cut off with a dull knife” and giving instructions on how to incinerate the body.

Smith, smirking, said his remarks to the phony hitman were “all in the script,” and he wanted no harm to come to the judge.

“It wasn’t nothing under personal. Legally, I had a problem with him,” Smith said.