Cosby trial shows sex crime laws must change
Bill Cosby is a free man, for now anyway, because a jury never could agree on whether one of TV’s most comforting dads drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand at his mansion outside Philadelphia in 2004.
Constand, 44, is the only one of dozens of Cosby accusers whose report led to a criminal trial because, in the other cases, the statute of limitations had expired. Though the prosecution wanted to present testimony from 13 others who have said that the comedian drugged and/or violated them, the judge allowed the jury to hear from only one of them. That made it a lot easier for the defense team to attack Constand and her credibility.
Cosby’s defense attorney, Brian McMonagle, offered a classic, offthe-rack depiction of Constand as a fabulist and willing participant on the “romantic” night Cosby gave her pills “to relax” and then “danced outside (his) marriage.”
Looking at Cosby, 79, I saw not good old Cliff Huxtable from The
Cosby Show, but a man accused publicly by some 60 women across the decades. Those women, and in fact all other sexual assault victims and their supporters, were put on trial by the defense, too.
“We know why we’re here. Let’s be real. ... We’re not here because of Andrea Constand. We’re here because of them,” McMonagle said, shouting and pointing at the back of the courtroom, where other accusers were sitting.
Cosby is one lucky guy. He’s still supported by his wife of five decades, Camille. And to a remarkable extent, he was spared the national avalanche of attention that his trial would normally have attracted by all the high drama surrounding the self-proclaimed p---y-grabber in the White House.
Whatever comes next, and the prosecutor has vowed to retry the case, the most important question the trial leaves unanswered is this: When are we going to update our antiquated statutes of limitations — the legal limits that a modern understanding of sexual assault should have forced us to rethink decades ago?
It’s not just that it can take a long time for victims to come forward to report an attack, but that to some extent, public attitudes on rape and assault have shifted in recent years.
Constand pursued criminal charges against Cosby in 2005 and got nowhere, not because detectives didn’t believe her but because her case didn’t seem winnable.
Many prosecutors still only agree to try sexual assault and rape cases they know they can win. But it’s a Catch-22 to say that years ago, we would never have taken that case, and now that we might, it happened too long ago for us to even consider it.
Last year, California scrapped its statute of limitations on sex crimes altogether, and Nevada and Colorado extended theirs to 20 years. That so many reports of wrongdoing netted only one criminal case against Cosby shows just how badly other states need to follow their lead.