Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Cosby in prison, appeal pending
Bill Cosby spent his first night in prison as he began his three- to 10-year sentence for sexual assault.
Bill Cosby spent his first night in prison alone, in a single cell near the infirmary, as he began his three-to-10-year sentence for sexual assault.
Corrections officials announced Wednesday that Cosby — now known as Inmate No. NN7687 — will serve his sentence at SCI Phoenix, a new state prison about 20 miles from the gated estate where a jury concluded he drugged and molested a woman in 2004. The $400 million lockup opened two months ago and can hold 3,830 inmates.
Cosby will meet with prison medical staff, psychologists and others as the staff assesses his needs. Under prison policy, the 81-year-old comedian will be allowed phone calls, visits and exercise.
The prison’s long-term goal is to place Cosby in the general population, officials said.
“We are taking all of the necessary precautions to ensure Mr. Cosby’s safety and general welfare in our institution,” Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said in a statement.
Cosby’s attorneys are readying a long-shot bid to get his sexual assault conviction overturned. They’re also fighting civil lawsuits filed by some accusers that threaten to drain his vast fortune.
Cosby’s lawyers gave glimpses of their expected appeal at his April retrial. They were dismayed by Judge Steven O’Neill’s weighty decision to let five additional accusers testify, after he allowed just one at the first trial, and moved for a mistrial when one of the women called Cosby a “serial rapist” from the stand.
Cosby’s team — namely his wife, Camille — has been lashing out at O’Neill and accusing prosecutors of using illegal evidence.
Still, legal experts say, Cosby faces long odds of winning on appeal.
Appellate courts give trial judges broad discretion to make decisions affecting how a case is tried, and they overturn only a fraction of convictions. Cosby would stand a better chance, experts say, if he could show that O’Neill made errors that violated his constitutional rights.
Also judging Cosby harshly are many black Americans who see a comeuppance in the entertainer’s saga.
After spending years building his persona as a model husband and father, Cosby took an abrupt turn nearly 15 years ago with a now-infamous speech to an NAACP convention.
He used his celebrity status to condemn poor African-Americans, chiding them to pull up their sagging pants, deriding them for having children out of wedlock and blaming them for their impoverished circumstances.
“Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack, with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.”
As they learned of Cosby’s fate, the same people who were his targets in the 2004 speech regarded his fate as a convergence of karma, hubris and hypocrisy. Some quoted Cosby’s own words in tweets announcing the sentence.
Cosby “made the decision to focus his attention on beating up on the black poor, on telling the world that black people were dysfunctional, pathological and undeserving of equal protection under the law,” said Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill. “When somebody like that, who positions themselves as the moral authority of black America, gets called onto the carpet, you ain’t getting no breaks here. People are going to be frustrated.”
Writer Michael Arceneaux said Cosby’s contempt for people who grew up in low-income communities, as Arceneaux did in Houston, left him with little sympathy for Cosby, who also hailed from humble beginnings.
“I found it enraging,” Arceneaux said of the speech. “To learn how much pain he has caused to women over decades ... I find it ironic. Those speeches proved to be his undoing. I’m glad he got what he deserved.”