According to the higher court, Cosby should not have been prosecuted in this case because of an agreement reached with the prosecutor in connection with civil proceedings in the same case. The new verdict orders the release of the 83-year-old actor and forbids repeating the trial.
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The state supreme court intervened at the moment when Cosby had already served more than two years from a sentence that could last up to ten years. An MSNBC reporter, citing an unnamed source, said the former comedian would be free in a few hours.
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Cosby has been charged with over 60 women of various sexual crimes, several of whom have reported being given drugs. Most of the time, however, the alleged acts were time-barred at the time of the public testimony, only the charges against Andrea Constand, whom Cosby allegedly raped in 2004, ended up in court. The Pennsylvania prosecutor’s office first an out-of-court settlement was reached in 2006.
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Error of the prosecutor’s office
However, in 2015, the prosecutor’s office, with the new management, withdrew from the previous agreement and indicted Cosby, also on the basis of statements from the aforementioned civil proceedings. And it was this moment that the Supreme Court challenged in its verdict, noting that Cosby made “several incriminating statements” in statements made in agreement with the prosecutor.
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“The freedom granted to prosecutors in our community (Pennsylvania), however great, does not mean that its application is deprived of the restriction of due process,” the decision said. “When an unconditional decision to charge or not to charge is made publicly and with the intention of taking action and giving the other party certainty … denying the other party the benefits of that decision constitutes an insult to basic justice,” the majority of the judicial panel continues.
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She described the abolition of both the sentencing verdict and the sentence as the only correct course of action, although the media note that there was no evidence that Cosby’s agreement with the prosecutor’s office ever took the form of a written statement. At the same time, the Supreme Court ruled that further prosecution of Cosby on the basis of “these specific allegations” is not possible. It was not immediately clear how the prosecution would react to the development.
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