Decisions coming soon for possible Cosby retrial
Jury selection, strategy expected to be different
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 aging comedian who has made an elegant wooden cane his signature prop on the most dangerous stage of his storied career.
The mistrial declared 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.
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. Defense 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 Philadelphiaarea 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.
Steele, the lead prosecutor, tends to be cautious in his public statements.
A career prosecutor, Steele will have insights in the retrial that he did not have in the first trial: He and his key witnesses have now gotten a detailed view of the defense team’s strategy and its methods of handling cross-examinations.
“It’s obviously more difficult for the defense to find some new surprises,” Mcandrews, the former prosecutor, said. “They want the element of surprise.”
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 tony Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.
Some of the offstage participants also have played a role in shaping public perceptions of the case since the mistrial was declared. Cosby’s wife, Camille — who skipped all but the defense closing argument — issued a blistering statement Saturday. She accused Judge Steven T. O’neill, who oversaw the case, of “arrogantly” siding with the prosecution.
O’neill, an intense and folksy jurist who often strolled the hallways during six days of jury deliberations loudly whistling the theme from the television show “The Leftovers,” seemed to side with the prosecution by allowing deliberations to drag on for 52 hours. But Camille Cosby’s criticism of him was puzzling because he issued an all-important pretrial ruling that seemed to help the defense and dealt a crushing blow to prosecutors. In that decision, O’neill blocked testimony during the trial by all but one of 13 women whom prosecutors identified as past victims and wanted to call as witnesses to establish a pattern of conduct by Cosby.
On the opposite side of drama from Camille Cosby, more than half a dozen women who have publicly asserted that they were sexually assaulted by the comedian appeared in court as spectators during the trial to support Constand. Afterward the women, who have bonded in the past 2½ years since the scandal broke and grew even closer during the trial, were upbeat.
Jewel Allison, a New York-based artist, poet and activist who has said Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, hugged Constand in the courtroom after the mistrial announcement.
“This was basically just practicing to get the ball in the basket,” Allison says she told Constand, a former star high school, college and Italian professional league basketball player. “Next time is the big game.”
On Sunday, Allison went to church back home in New York.
“As you can only imagine,” Allison said, “I’ve got a lot to praise God for.”