Bill Cosby Wins Right To Appeal Sexual Assault Conviction In Court Decision
Bill Cosby won a major legal victory on Tuesday (June 23), after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court court decided the disgraced television icon can appeal is 2018 sexual assault conviction, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Cosby, 82, is currently serving a three-to-ten year sentence after a jury convicted him of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004. His defense attorneys argued during the trial that the prosecution should not have been allowed to call five other accusers to testify about encounters with Cosby, as the statute of limitations had passed on those incidents.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has agreed to review this decision, as well as whether the jury should have heard evidence that Cosby had given quaaludes to women in the past.
The court will also examine Cosby's claim that he had an agreement with a former prosecutor that he would never be charged in the case if he agreed to testify in Constand's 2006 civil lawsuit.
Cosby was charged in December 2015, days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired, after Cosby's decade-old deposition testimony in Constand's case against Cosby was unsealed. After that, dozens of other accusers came forward to accuse Cosby of similar misconduct. Montgomery County Judge Stephen O'Neill allowed just one of them to testify at Cosby's first trial in 2017, which ended with an acquittal.
But at Cosby's retrial a year later, at the height of the #MeToo movement, the same judge allowed five other accusers to testify. The jury convicted Cosby on all three felony sex-assault counts.
According to the AJC, Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said Cosby was “extremely thankful” the court would hear the case. He said the decision comes as demonstrators across the nation protest the death of Black people at the hands of police and expose the “corruption that lies within the criminal justice system.”
“As we have all stated, the false conviction of Bill Cosby is so much bigger than him — it’s about the destruction of ALL Black people and people of color in America,” Wyatt said in a statement.
