Cosby to face retrial, district attorney vows
Toronto accuser Constand ‘entitled to a verdict’ after judge declares mistrial due to hung jury
NORRISTOWN, PA.— Prosecutors in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial have vowed to try him a second time.
Judge Steven O’Neill declared a mistrial on Saturday after the jury, which had deliberated for a week, said it was hopelessly deadlocked on charges the 79-yearold TV star drugged and molested former Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his Philadelphia-area home in 2004. Cosby says the encounter was consensual.
District Attorney Kevin Steele says he’s disappointed jurors didn’t reach a unanimous decision, but says he’ll retry Cosby, who will remain free on $1 million bail.
O’Neill said he would set a date for a new trial within months.
The outcome denied vindication to either Constand or the dozens of women who have accused Cosby of assaulting them over a span of decades.
“We will take a hard look at everything involved and then we will retry it,” Steele said, adding that Constand, who lives in Toronto, “is entitled to a verdict.”
Cosby, 79, and Constand, 44, reacted stoically inside the Montgomery County Courthouse.
He watched, expressionless, as the judge and lawyers spoke, rubbing his face a few times.
As he walked out, he said to his lawyers, “you lead the way.”
Constand did not react visibly to the proceedings, staring straight ahead in her seat in the front row. She stood as Cosby passed her just a few feet away, and then, smiling slightly, she hugged her supporters — including her mother and six other women who have accused Cosby.
She seemed to be comforting them more than the other way around. Her lawyer, Dolores Troiani, said they looked forward to a retrial, adding, “We will get to do it again.”
But as restrained as the two principal figures in the case were — neither spoke to reporters — pent-up emotion poured out on both sides. One of the accusers, Lili Bernard, wept in the courtroom, and another, Victoria Valentino, said she was “devastated, but the work goes on.”
O’Neill praised the jurors for their service and asked them not to discuss their deliberations. “They are yours and yours alone,” he said. Lawyers on both sides said they did not know how the jury had divided between conviction and acquittal.
“Mr. Cosby began this trial presumed innocent and he leaves it that way,” said Brian McMonagle, Bill Cosby’s lead lawyer. “If the case is retried, know that I will once again put them to the test.”
Steele said that even with an inconclusive result, the case had been valuable because it “sends a strong message that victims of these types of crimes can come forward and can be heard.” Too often, he said, such victims do not report their assaults.
Whatever the outcome, the events leading up to the trial smashed the image Cosby had built over more than half a century in show business, as a comedian and a moralizing pub- lic figure. He has admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving Quaaludes to women to induce them to have sex.
Cosby’s supporters had hoped that a not-guilty verdict might tarnish the broader pool of accusations that had been levelled against him and stained his legacy. Several of the women have ongoing cases in which they have sued Cosby for slander after his representatives suggested their accounts were fabrications.
Although the charges were based on a single incident involving one woman, the spectre of the other allegations hung over the case from the start. Jurors conceded during jury selection that they were aware of the claims, and in his closing argument McMonagle cited the “drumbeat” of highly publicized charges, saying that the case was more media frenzy than legal tribunal.
Steele had wanted to call a dozen other accusers as witnesses to demonstrate a pattern of behaviour by Cosby, but O’Neill allowed just one to testify — Kelly Johnson, who said that Cosby had drugged and assaulted her in 1996. Adding weight to the allegations was the revelation in 2015 that Cosby, in a 2005 lawsuit filed by Constand, had admitted securing Quaaludes so women would have sex with him — an admission that was introduced last week.
Constand took the witness stand as a proxy for all of Cosby’s accusers, many of whom told stories similar to hers. None of the other women’s accusations have resulted in prosecution — in many cases, too much time has passed — leaving hers as the only formal test of Cosby’s guilt and, in the eyes of many of them, the only chance for justice.
The case turned largely on the credibility of Constand, a former Temple University employee, who testified that in a visit to the home of Cosby, a Temple trustee, he gave her three pills that he said were herbal. She said the pills left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness; he has said they were Benadryl.