HARRISBURG (CN) — Pennsylvania’s highest court tossed out Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction and ordered his release from prison Wednesday, finding the comedian's 2005 agreement with a prosecutor prevented him from being charged over the same conduct.
"When a prosecutor makes an unconditional promise of non-prosecution, and when the defendant relies upon that guarantee to the detriment of his constitutional right not to testify, the principle of fundamental fairness that undergirds due process of law in our criminal justice system demands that the promise be enforce," Justice David Wecht wrote in the 79-page majority opinion Wednesday.
Pennsylvania officials have made no statement yet about whether they plan to appeal. The decision comes nearly three years into the 83-year-old Cosby’s sentence of 3 to 10 years stemming from his being found guilty of the drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand, whom he met through his trusteeship at Temple University where Constand was on the women’s basketball administration.
Thirty-five years Cosby’s junior and gay, Constand said she had seen the iconic Black star as a mentor, and trusted him when he gave her pills “to take the edge off” one night when she came to him for career advice.
Soon thereafter, however, she found herself immobile as the man known to a generation as the family-minded Dr. Huxtable penetrated her with his fingers on a couch and made her touch his penis.
Constand initially reported her assault to Montgomery County authorities, only to be told by then-District Attorney Bruce Castor that her case was too weak to prosecute. She instead pursued a civil case that ended in a $3.4 million settlement. Just as the statute of limitations on the crime was set to close nearly a decade later, however, Constand's claims found new life when a federal judge unsealed Cosby's secret depositions from the civil matter.
The case by then had exploded in the national spotlight after another Black comedian, Hannibal Buress, cast doubt on Cosby's sacrosanct wholesome image, leading dozens of women to come forward with stories from over the years about being drugged and raped by Cosby. Constand was the only accuser whose claims were not too old to prosecute.
Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill ultimately presided over two lengthy trials of Cosby, his first having ended in a hung jury. Critical to his 2018 conviction was the 2005 deposition transcript in which Cosby admitted that he would buy quaaludes to give to women before having sex with them. O'Neill also admitted testimony from five other self-identified victims of Cosby.
But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled 4-3 Wednesday that the prosecution was barred by his 2005 agreement with Castor, a lawyer who made headlines yet again this year as one half of former President Donald Trump's impeachment defense team following Trump's stoking of an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6.
Justice Wecht noted in the ruling Wednesday that Cosby was unable to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination during deposition for Constand's civil suit because Castor had removed the threat of criminal charges.
The transcript of Cosby's deposition testimony included not only the blockbuster quaalude admission but his assertion that he gave Constand three half-pills of Benadryl. He said he did this to help her relax as she had complained about having difficulty sleeping and that afterward they had begun consensually kissing and touching each other.
On the road to trial, Judge O'Neill had ruled that any purported immunity offer from Castor was defective because a “press release, signed or not, was legally insufficient to form the basis of an enforceable promise not to prosecute.” The court had also faulted Cosby’s attorneys for failing to demand written documentation that the state had promised not to prosecute.
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