Bill Cosby, inmate NN7687, starts sentence in single cell
Bill Cosby spent his first night in prison alone, in a single cell near the infirmary, as he began his three-to-10-year sentence for sexual assault.
Corrections officials announced on Wednesday that Cosby — now known as Inmate No. NN7687 — will serve his sentence at SCI Phoenix, a new Pennsylvania state prison about 30 kilometres from where a jury concluded he drugged and molested a woman in 2004.
Cosby will meet with prison medical staff, psychologists and others, in order to assess his needs. Under prison policy, the 81-year-old comedian will be allowed phone calls and visits and will get a chance to exercise.
The long-term goal is to place Cosby in the general population, prison officials said.
“We are taking all of the necessary precautions to ensure Mr. Cosby’s safety and general welfare,” Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said in a statement.
As Cosby began life behind bars, his family and publicists vowed he’ll appeal his conviction on three felony sexualassault counts after the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.
Calling Cosby “one of the greatest civil rights leaders in the United States for over the past 50 years,” spokesman Andrew Wyatt on Tuesday decried the trial as the “most sexist and racist” in U.S. history.
The judge, prosecutor and jury saw it differently.
“No one is above the law. And no one should be treated disproportionately because of who they are, where they live, or even their wealth, celebrity or philanthropy,” Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill said in sentencing Cosby to an above-average sentence.
Cosby’s defence team has raised the racial issue before, in 2016.
“We prosecute where the evidence takes us and that was done in this case,” District Attorney Kevin Steele said on Tuesday.
After his first trial ended in a hung jury, Cosby was convicted in April of drugging and sexually assaulting Temple University women’s basketball administrator Andrea Constand. He has faced a barrage of similar accusations from more than 60 women over the past five decades, but Constand’s case is the only one that went to trial.
In a statement submitted to the court, Constand, 45, said the assault and Cosby’s subsequent attacks on her character had crushed her spirit, adding: “We may never know the full extent of his double life as a sexual predator, but his decades-long reign of terror as a serial rapist is over.”
Prosecutor Kristen Feden said Constand told her she was happy with the sentence.
“I always look for my strength in the victims, and Andrea Constand was amazing,” Feden said on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday. “Her courage and her strength was enough for me to say: ‘Let’s keep going.’ ”
Cosby’s lawyers had asked that he be allowed to remain free on bail while he appeals his conviction, but the judge ordered him locked up immediately.
Cosby — who is legally blind and uses a cane — must serve the minimum of three years before becoming eligible for parole.