Cosby lawyers want new trial

– Attorneys for Bill Cosby outlined their grounds on Tuesday for appealing his sexual assault conviction, citing what they called errors in legal procedure that may have biased the jury and warrant a new trial for the once-beloved comedian.

The 81-year-old performer, best known for his role as the lovable physician on the hit television sitcom The Cosby Show, was found guilty by a Pennsylvania jury in April of drugging and sexually assaulting a onetime friend in 2004.

It marked the first such criminal conviction of a celebrity accused of sexual misconduct since the #MeToo movement that has brought down dozens of powerful men in American media, politics and business.

In September, the trial judge, Steven O’Neill, designated Cosby a “sexually violent predator” under Pennsylvania law, requiring the entertainer to register as a sex offender for life, and sentenced him to a term of three to 10 years in prison.

Cosby, who is married, has insisted sexual encounters he had were consensual. He was found guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault.

In an eight-page filing laying out the basis of their appeal, Cosby’s lawyers focused on several instances they said introduced bias into the trial, including the judge’s refusal to excuse a juror that the defence argued was unable to be fair and impartial.

The defence asserted the juror in question had stated an inclination to believe Cosby guilty at the outset of the trial.

In addition, O’Neill failed to disclose a biased relationship with Bruce Castor, a former Montgomery County district attorney with whom defence lawyers said the judge had a confrontation.

Cosby’s lawyers have argued that Castor promised in 2005 that Cosby would not be prosecuted if he agreed to sit for a sworn deposition in a civil suit brought against him by his accuser, former Temple University administrator Andrea Constand.

That deposition, in which Cosby acknowledged giving sedatives to young women to have sex with them, was unsealed a decade later, and Castor’s successor, District Attorney Kevin Steele, cited it as a crucial piece of evidence when criminal charges were brought. –