JUSTICES URGED TO RESTORE COSBY’S CONVICTION

Prosecutors urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction, complaining in a petition released Monday the verdict was thrown out over a questionable agreement that the entertainer claimed gave him lifetime immunity.

They said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision in June to overturn Cosby's conviction created a dangerous precedent by giving a press release the legal weight of an immunity agreement.

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele called the court's decision “an indefensible rule,“predicting an onslaught of criminal appeals if it remains law.

“This decision as it stands will have far-reaching negative consequences beyond Montgomery County and Pennsylvania. The U.S. Supreme Court can right what we believe is a grievous wrong,” Steele wrote in the filing, which seeks review under the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Cosby's lawyers have long argued that he relied on a promise that he would never be charged when he gave damaging testimony in an accuser's civil suit in 2006. The admissions were later used against him in two criminal trials.

The only written evidence of such a promise is a 2005 press release from then-prosecutor Bruce Castor, who said he did not have enough evidence to arrest Cosby.

The release included an ambiguous “caution” that Castor “will reconsider this

decision should the need arise.”

The parties have since spent years debating what that meant.

Steele's bid to revive the case is a long shot. The U.S. Supreme Court accepts fewer than 1 percent of the petitions it receives. At least four justices on the ninemember court would have to agree to hear the case. A decision on the petition, filed Wednesday but only made public Monday, is not expected for several months.

Castor's successors, who gathered new evidence and arrested Cosby in 2015, doubt Castor ever made such a deal. Instead, they say Cosby had strategic reasons to give the deposition rather than invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, even if it backfired when “he slipped up” in his rambling testimony.