Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Cosby jurors were worried about ‘politics’
Some on the panel were concerned that it took 10 years for charges to be filed.
PITTSBURGH — A juror in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial said Thursday that some jurors were concerned that prosecutors waited 10 years to charge him, expressing suspicion that politics had played a role in the case.
The juror told The Associated Press that the panel was almost evenly split in its deliberations, with a similar number of jurors wanting to convict the 79-year-old entertainer as acquit him on charges he drugged and molested a woman at his Philadelphia-area home in 2004.
He was the second juror to speak out after the jury deadlocked in the case. A mistrial was declared Saturday after 52 hours of deliberations. Prosecutors plan to try Cosby again.
The juror who spoke to the AP questioned the long delay in bringing charges against the TV star, suggesting that “no new evidence from ’05 to now has showed up, ... nothing.”
In reality, prosecutors reopened the investigation in 2015 after the public release of a deposition that Cosby gave in 2005 and 2006 as part of accuser Andrea Constand’s lawsuit against him — testimony that hadn’t yet been offered when another district attorney passed on the case in early 2005. Prosecutors used Cosby’s deposition as evidence at the criminal trial.
The juror spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the sensitive deliberations.
Constand told jurors Cosby gave her pills that made her woozy and then penetrated her with his fingers as she lay paralyzed on a couch, unable to tell him to stop. Cosby has said his encounter with Constand was consensual.
Constand, now 44, initially went to police about a year after she said Cosby assaulted her, but a prosecutor declared her case too weak to bring charges.
A decade later, another district attorney revived the probe after excerpts from Cosby’s lurid deposition about drugs and sex became public, and dozens of women came forward also alleging he assaulted them.
The juror who spoke to the AP said other jurors expressed the view in the deliberating room that “politics was involved.”
“I think they created this whole thing, a case that was settled in ’05, and we had to bring it up again in ’17 with no new evidence,” the juror said.