Cosby: a case of ‘he said, she said’
THEY almost surely will meet again in a court of law.
One more time, the lanky former jock with the loose-limbed gait and the mound of curly hair is likely to sit across a courtroom from the lumbering and ageing comedian who has made an elegant wooden cane his signature prop on the most dangerous stage of his storied career.
The mistrial declared on Saturday morning set the scene for a courtroom rematch between Andrea Constand, a former women’s professional basketball player, and Bill Cosby, the comic legend who she says drugged and sexually assaulted her. Even though the machinations of a retrial would be handled by attorneys, the ultimate decision of the next panel of jurors will be, once again, heavily dependent on their assessment of Constand and Cosby.
As one of the jurors in the first trial said during jury selection in this case so bereft of physical evidence, the saga boils down to a matter of “he said, she said”.
It’s likely that Cosby’s defence team will try to block a new trial, but legal experts say they are unlikely to prevail. The retrial is expected to bear many similarities to the first trial, but there might be key differences that could affect the outcome.
The jury that said it was “hopelessly deadlocked” on Saturday was selected in Pittsburgh, then bused to suburban Philadelphia and sequestered during 11 days of testimony and deliberations. Defence attorneys had pushed to select a jury from another county because of intense pretrial publicity in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where District Attorney Kevin Steele, during his 2015 election campaign, had been critical of one of his predecessors for not prosecuting Cosby.
It’s possible the next jury could be selected in another county so as not to place too heavy of a burden on Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, said Dennis McAndrews, a former Philadelphia-area prosecutor. McAndrews suggested that a jury pool could be drawn from the Harrisburg area of Dauphin County, or from the Scranton area of Lackawanna County.
The saturation coverage of Cosby’s mistrial is sure to complicate jury selection. Television satellite trucks clotted the street in front of the preCivil War stone courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where Cosby’s trial was held. Granular details of the evidence were splayed across newspaper front pages and websites, parsed on radio talk shows and pored over in duelling spin contests.
Still, legal experts say, it won’t be impossible to find 12 people to sit in judgment of Cosby, who turns 80 on July 12.
Yet the fundamental potential flaw in the case will remain: Constand’s inconsistent statements to police about matters such as the date and circumstances of the alleged assault, which she says took place in 2004 at Cosby’s gated estate in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. – Washington Post