COSBY FREED
PHILADELPHIA – Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction Wednesday after finding an agreement with a previous prosecutor prevented him from being charged in the case.
The 83-year-old Cosby, who was once beloved as “America’s Dad,” was convicted of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia estate in 2004.
He was charged in late 2015, when a prosecutor armed with newly unsealed evidence – Cosby’s damaging deposition from her lawsuit – arrested him days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired.
Cosby has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a state prison near Philadelphia. He had vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge any remorse over the encounter with Constand.
The trial judge had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosby’s first trial in 2017, when the jury deadlocked. However, he then allowed five other accusers to testify at the retrial about their experiences with Cosby in the 1980s.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that testimony tainted the trial, even though a lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a signature pattern of drugging and molesting women.
The court also found that Cosby’s second trial was unfair because prosecutors used damaging evidence Cosby turned over in Constand’s civil case to convict him of criminal offenses, even though a previous district attorney in Montgomery County years earlier told him those charges were off the table. In effect, the opinion concluded, Cosby was forced to give up his Fifth Amendment right to self-incrimination.
“When an unconditional charging decision is made publicly and with the intent to induce action and reliance by the defendant, and when the defendant does so to his detriment (and in some instances upon the advice of counsel), denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade,” the decision concluded.
“No mere changing of the guard strips that circumstance of its inequity . ... For these reasons, Cosby’s convictions and judgment of sentence are vacated, and he is discharged.”
Cosby was the first celebrity tried and convicted in the #MeToo era, so the reversal could make prosecutors wary of calling other accusers in similar cases. The law on prior bad act testimony varies by state, though, and the ruling only holds sway in Pennsylvania.
Prosecutors did not immediately say if they would appeal or seek to try Cosby for a third time.
Cosby’s spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, did not immediately return messages seeking comment, or clarity on when he would be released from prison.
The Pennsylvania justices voiced concern not just about sexual assault cases, but what they saw as the judiciary’s increasing tendency to allow testimony that crosses the line into character attacks. The law allows the testimony only in limited cases, including to show a crime pattern so specific it serves to identify the perpetrator.