Thursday, July 01, 2021

Bill Cosby is Freed from Jail

Bill Cosby has just been acquitted:
In their 79-page opinion, the judges wrote that a “non-prosecution agreement” that had been struck with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case, and that he should be discharged. They barred a retrial in the case.

In 2005, Mr. Cosby was investigated in the case of Ms. Constand, and a former district attorney of Montgomery County had given Mr. Cosby his assurance that he would not be charged in the case. The former district attorney, Bruce Castor Jr., has testified that while there was insufficient evidence to bring a criminal prosecution, he had given Mr. Cosby the assurance to encourage him to testify in a subsequent civil case brought by Ms. Constand.

I said before that I don't think that Cosby got a fair trial. There was very little evidence of the crime, and the conviction was based mostly on character assassinations from other women.

It was also clear that the prosecutors were out to get Cosby for political reasons.

The most outrageous thing was that some inadmissible evidence was used against him, with the judge justifyng it by saying that he deserved to be punished for expressing some conservative views in a speech.

The Penn. supreme court ruled 4-3 in his favor, with the three female judges ruling with the majority.

This is one of the two big MeToo cases, with the other being Harvey Weinstein, who similarly got an unfair trial. I agree with Geraldo Rivera that these men have been monsters, but there was not a good criminal case against either one. The entire news media spent years trying to convince us that these men were criminals, and that their convictions would bring a new MeToo era.

Here is how Wikipedia describes release of the inadmissible evidence that imprisoned Cosby for two years:

[Cosby's 2004] speech was cited by Judge Eduardo C. Robreno as an example of Cosby's role as a "public moralist", when he unsealed court records to reveal Cosby's admissions of infidelity and giving Quaaludes to women prior to allegedly sexually assaulting them.[1][11] Robreno wrote that, by volunteering to the public "his views on, among other things, childrearing, family life, education, and crime",[1][12] Cosby had "narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim".[
Got that? If you express conservative views on childrearing, family life, education, and crime, then you forfeit some of your privacy and constitutional rights. Cosby spent two years in prison for it.

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