Prosecutors ask US Supreme Court to rule on Bill Cosby release

WASHINGTON: Prosecutors have asked the US Supreme Court to review comedian Bill Cosby’s overturned conviction for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman 15 years ago, they announced Monday.

“The US Supreme Court can right what we believe is a grievous wrong,” Kevin Steele, district attorney for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania said in a statement announcing that the appeal had been filed last Wednesday.

Cosby was freed from prison on June 30 following a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that he had been denied a fair trial, in a move seen as a blow to the #MeToo movement.

At the time of his release, the comedian had been jailed since 2018 for assaulting Andrea Constand at his Philadelphia mansion in 2004 when she was an employee at Temple University.

In its decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court focused on a nonprosecution agreement between a former district attorney and Cosby over evidence he gave in a civil case.

Cosby had admitted giving Quaaludes, a now banned party drug, to women with a view to having sex with them in deposition testimony in that case.

However the testimony was then used against him in a criminal trial years later brought forward by Steele.

Cosby’s lawyers argued he believed that testimony was immune from prosecution in criminal court when he gave it.

They argued that the nonprosecution agreement meant he should not have been charged, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices agreed with.

However Steele said Monday that ‘petitioning to ask the High Court for review was the right thing to do’ and denounced the ‘far-reaching negative consequences’ of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision. In his appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Cosby presented a 2005 press release as evidence of the first prosecutor’s statement not to prosecute him.