COULD BE A LOST COS
Defense attorney tells jury: ‘I pray you’ll do your job better than I did mine’
Bill Cosby’s lawyers all but threw in the towel Monday in his sex-assault trial — presenting a defense case that lasted no more than six minutes.
Jurors then deliberated for about four hours without reaching a verdict Monday night, after the defense called Pennsylvania Detective Richard Schaffer, who first testified last week, but then declined to put Cosby himself on the stand.
The comedian, who claims to be legally blind, told Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill he opted not to testify or call any more witnesses after consulting with his lawyers.
“Is it your decision not to testify?” O’Neill asked out of the presence of jurors. “Yes,” Cosby replied. Afterward, lead counsel Brian McMonagle — often in a shrill, rambling manner — tried to sell jurors on the idea that there was enough reasonable doubt to acquit Cosby of the three counts of aggravated indecent assault against him.
“I pray to God you’ll do your job better than I did mine,” McMonagle pleaded with the panel of seven men and five women during his roughly two-hour closing statement.
“If, during the course of this trial, I have said or done anything that might have offended one of you, hold it against me, not him. Me — not him. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and that’s not good for a lawyer.”
The veteran defense attorney zeroed in on discrepancies in accuser Andrea Constand’s timeline about the alleged 2004 assault.
Constand initially told police that Cosby, now 79, drugged and molested her in March 2004 — then changed the claim to sometime in January.
“If that doesn’t make you hesitate, I don’t know what will,” McMonagle said. “Two times, two times she says this incident happened in March [2004].”
He also reminded the panel that the case was too weak to prosecute back in 2005, when Constand first reported the assault to police.
“This is their evidence that they gave you,” McMonagle said. “This is why this case went into a trash can, because Mr. Cosby told them everything they needed to know. ‘ We laid down, we did what we normally do, I went to bed. I got up, she was up. I made her a muffin.’ ”
Constand, now 44, testified last week that Cosby gave her three blue pills one night at his suburban Philadelphia home to help her “relax.” But, she said, the mystery drugs made her pass out — and she awoke to find Cosby groping her.
In his closing arguments, Montgomery County DA Kevin Steele focused on Constand’s graphic testimony, saying it was “sufficient alone to sustain a conviction in this case.”
Speaking publicly about the allega- tions for the first time last Tuesday, Constand said under oath that she looked to Cosby as her “mentor” — an image that quickly dissolved after the night in January 2004.
“I was jolted conscious, jolted awake, and I felt Mr. Cosby’s hand groping my breasts, under my shirt,” Constand recalled. “I felt his hand inside my vagina, moving in and out. And I felt him take my hand, place it on his penis and move it back and forth.”
On whether she asked him to stop, she answered, “I wasn’t able to. In my head, I was trying to get my hands to move and my legs to move, and those messages were frozen.”
Steele also turned to Cosby’s own words, telling jurors the man best known as “America’s Dad,” Dr. Cliff Huxtable, on his long-running “The Cosby Show” detailed over and over across various depositions what he’d done to Constand.
“Look very, very closely at his words. They are all that matter,” said Steele in his nearly 2¹/2-hour-long summation. “He knows the effect of what he gave her. We know it out of his mouth, and that is the case that you are here to decide.”
In one interview a year after the alleged assault, Cosby told police he gave Constand the antihistamine Benadryl before fondling her on his couch.
Jurors also heard about how he placed a disturbing phone call to Constand’s mother, Gianna, in which he called her “Mom” as he boasted about making her daughter have an orgasm.
“He talks to Gianna Constand, and he says he’s a sick man and he’s apol-
ogizing,” Steele said. “He says he’s thinking he’s a ‘dirty old man’ [with] a young girl. He apologizes to the mother and says it is ‘digital penetration.’ ”
In perhaps the most damning deposition, Cosby admitted to plying other women with Quaaludes, a powerful sedative, before having sex with them.
The admission was revealed as part of Constand’s civil suit filed after prosecutors failed to press criminal charges against Cosby.
“These are his own words, which I would suggest you consider very, very slowly,” Steele told jurors. “That’s something that came out of his mouth, to show what’s in his head.”
McMonagle, however, brushed off the Quaalude evidence.
“He’s talking about things that happened in 1976!” he bellowed during closings. “That’s what was going on back in the day.”
As the jury deliberated Monday, they stopped at one point and asked to have read to them part of a deposition Cosby gave to Constand’s lawyers in the civil suit. In it, Cosby talked about giving her pills and called them “three friends to make you relax.”
As the jurors deliberated further into the evening, they asked no more questions and adjourned at about 9:45 p.m. They will continue Tuesday.
During the six-day trial, the defense portrayed Constand and Cosby as having a full-blown ro- mantic relationship after meeting at Temple University, where Constand, then 31, worked as a basketball director and where Cosby served on the board of trustees.
“Sometimes, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills,” McMonagle said. “It’s a relationship. They stay intimate, they were intimate, they are intimate.”
He later added, “Why are we running from the truth of this case, of the relationship. Why?”
But Steele reminded jurors that Cosby’s guilt or innocence hinges simply on whether Constand was able to consent to what took place 12 years ago.
“She couldn’t say no,” Steele said. “By doing what he did on that night, he took away her abil- ity. He gave her no choice in this matter. Why? Because of what he wanted . . . It is about as straightforward as you will ever see in a sex-crimes case. Ever.”
Steele slammed the notion that the two were lovers.
“You should be insulted by that,” he told jurors. “Drugging somebody and putting them in a position so you can do something to them is not romantic — it’s criminal.”
He added, “All the defense he has can’t get around his own words.”
At times, a weary-looking Cosby — who was joined in court for the first time during the trial Monday by his wife Camille — hung his head or held his face in his hand.
Constand returned to court for closings and sat with her mother, who sometimes smiled broadly as Steele wrapped up.
Around 60 other women — including one who also testified last week, Kelly Johnson — have accused Cosby of drugging and raping them in similar fashion.
Steele said the way Cosby preyed on Constand and Johnson proved there was a pattern of behavior.
Cosby, he said, “ingratiated himself into their families” and served as a mentor to both women before allegedly assaulting them.
Cosby faces 10 to 30 years behind bars, if convicted.
He has vehemently denied the allegations, claiming that some of the women were financially motivated and that the accusations even had racial undertones.