The state's intermediate appeals court seemed unimpressed by either issue, rejecting Cosby’s first appeal. The jury convicted Cosby on all three sex assault counts.
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And, how many other accusers should be allowed to testify before the scales of justice tip against the accused?Ĭosby’s trial judge allowed just one other accuser in the first trial when the jury deadlocked, but five at the retrial a year later. But it was never put in writing, and Castor’s top deputy at the time, Risa Ferman, who helped run the initial investigation and reopened it in 2015 when she was district attorney, seemed not to know about it. Did Cosby have an ironclad deal with District Attorney Bruce Castor that Cosby could never be charged after Castor declined to arrest Cosby in 2005? Defense lawyers say Cosby relied on such a promise when he gave the 2006 deposition later unsealed in accuser Andrea Constand’s lawsuit - and used against him at trial.Ĭastor agrees they did. The appeal hinges on two questions that have shaped the case from the start: She declined to speak to the AP last week. “We know how women can lie,” said Camille Cosby, who made only brief appearances at her husband's trials, for defense closing arguments, and has not visited him in prison. In an interview last month with ABC-TV, Camille Cosby said the #MeToo movement ignores “the history of particular white women” who have “accused Black males of sexual assault without any proof.” “It would be naïve to assume that his prosecution was not tainted by the same racial bias that pervades the criminal justice process in both explicit and insidious ways,” she said last week.Ĭosby's wife of 56 years has been more blunt. His defenders, however, say race permeates the case.Ĭosby’s celebrity “does not change his status as a Black man," said appellate lawyer Jennifer Bonjean, the latest of more than a dozen criminal lawyers on the case. The appeal issues the court accepted don't directly include racial bias, which Cosby’s legal team raised more often on the courthouse steps in Montgomery County than inside the courtroom. “Cosby’s gospel of discipline, moral reform, and self-reliance offers a way out - a promise that one need not cure America of its original sin in order to succeed,” Coates wrote in his 2008 piece in The Atlantic, "'This Is How We Lost to the White Man': The audacity of Bill Cosby's Black conservatism." He earned acclaim for his groundbreaking (and intentionally race-blind) performances on television in the 1950s mingled, but rarely marched, with civil rights leaders and the Black elite in the 1960s and solidified his wealth and power with his star turn as “America's Dad,” on “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s.Īll the while, he promoted education and gave millions to historically Black universities.īut his increasingly jarring comments on poverty, parenthood and personal responsibility offended younger Blacks in his later years, most famously in his 2004 “Pound Cake” speech - which he gave just months after the sexual encounter that would prove his downfall.Īs he toured the country, Cosby argued that “the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities," as the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates noted.
“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,” Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said when the court accepted the appeal late last month.Ĭosby, who grew up in public housing in Philadelphia, has a complicated relationship with the Black community.
He hopes to use the moment to his advantage.
And now in the midst of another historic reckoning - this time addressing the treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police and the criminal justice system - the 82-year-old Cosby has won the right to an appeal.
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