CHICAGO — A month before his retrial on bribery charges, Illinois state Sen. Emil Jones III has agreed to enter into a deferred prosecution deal with prosecutors that will leave him with no conviction as long as he admits to certain illegal conduct and pays a fine.

The agreement was announced at a hearing Thursday before U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood and scuttles a trial that had been set for Jan. 12.

Under the terms of the deal, Jones would pay a fine of $6,800, agree to stay out of legal trouble and make admissions about his meetings with FBI mole Omar Maani and agree that his later statements to the FBI about how much Maani paid Jones’ intern were false.

If Jones lives up to his end of the agreement, the charges against him will be dropped in December 2026.

Dressed in a brown suit, Jones stood at the lectern in court and told the judge he was satisfied with the work of his attorneys. Asked by Wood if he wished to enter into the agreement, he answered “Absolutely” in a deep voice.

Jones, who entered court walking with a limp, later asked to sit down due to a sprained ankle.

Jones, 47, a Chicago Democrat and son of former Senate President Emil Jones Jr., was charged with agreeing to take bribes from an executive of a red-light camera company in exchange for Jones’ protection in Springfield against legislation that would hurt the company’s bottom line.

His first trial in April ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision on all counts.

The mistrial came nearly six years after FBI agents confronted Jones at his Roseland neighborhood home as part of a sweeping investigation into bribery schemes involving red-light cameras, liquor licenses and other graft across the west and southwest suburbs.

At the heart of the probe was Maani, co-founder of SafeSpeed LLC who agreed to work undercover for federal investigators after being confronted with evidence he was paying off officials in Oak Lawn in exchange for political support to add SafeSpeed cameras at additional intersections.

Maani, who was granted a deferred prosecution agreement by the U.S. attorney’s office for his extensive cooperation, was the star witness at Jones’ trial, testifying for the first time in public about his prolific turn as an FBI mole. That cooperation also has netted the convictions of former Crestwood Mayor Louis Presta, ex-Oakbrook Terrace Mayor Anthony Ragucci, and Jeffrey Tobolski, the former mayor of McCook and Cook County commissioner.

According to the charges, Jones agreed to accept $5,000 in campaign funding from Maani in exchange for Jones agreeing not to file a bill calling for a statewide study of red-light cameras. Maani also allegedly agreed to hire Jones’ district office intern at SafeSpeed.

Jones also offered to “protect” the company from his friend, then-state Rep. David McSweeney, who had filed bills of his own calling for an all-out ban of red-light cameras, according to prosecutors.

At his trial, Jones made the risky decision to testify in his own defense, telling the jury his namesake father, who spent nearly 40 years in the General Assembly before retiring in 2008, inspired him to go into politics.

“Ever since I was a child, I always wanted to be a state senator like my father and I decided to run,” Jones testified in April, leaving out that his father had retired abruptly after winning the primary and pitched his son as his replacement to favorable Democratic committeemen.

Jones told the jury he’s run unopposed ever since winning that first election. Asked by his attorney if he still had to raise money, Jones said, “I never had an election. I never had an opponent to run against. So ... no.”

But he still had a fund, Friends of Emil Jones, “to raise funds for my campaign if I ever had one,” Jones said.

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