Cosby lawyers detail 11 alleged trial errors as they appeal
PHILADELPHIA >> Bill Cosby’s lawyers detailed nearly a dozen alleged legal errors Tuesday, including the judge’s decision to send the case to trial, as they appeal his sexual assault conviction and three- to 10year prison term.
They’ve also asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this month to release the 81-year-old disgraced comedian from a state prison near Philadelphia while the appeal proceeds.
The lawyers said trial Judge Steven O’Neill had a feud with a pretrial witness, the ex-prosecutor who had declined to charge Cosby in 2005. And they said his decisions to assign himself the case, let five other accusers testify, air Cosby’s prior deposition testimony about quaaludes and dismiss the ex-prosecutor’s promise not to charge Cosby are mistakes that warrant a new trial.
“The trial court erred in failing to disclose his bias against District Attorney (Bruce) Castor, and in failing to recuse himself, prior to determining (his) credibility,” wrote lawyer Brian Perry of Harrisburg, the latest of more than a dozen lawyers to represent Cosby in the case.
A jury convicted Cosby at a spring retrial of drugging and molesting a Temple University employee in 2004, in what became the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era. Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment on Tuesday’s filing.
Cosby — whose estimated fortune from his TV shows, comedy tours and product pitches once topped $400 million — was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting accuser Andrea Constand. The entertainer, who is legally blind, spends his days in a oneman cell and private day room, in a new state prison about 20 miles from his sprawling estate near Philadelphia, where the crime occurred.
In a deposition in Constand’s 2005 civil suit, Cosby called the 2004 encounter consensual and his feelings for her romantic. Constand considered him a mentor with close ties to her boss at Temple, where she worked for the women’s basketball team. She was about 30 and Cosby, a Temple trustee, about 66. The key issues raised on appeal Tuesday include: