News legal analyst Enrique Latoison says District Attorney Kevin Steele’s request to the judge in the Bill Cosby’s sex-assault case to allow testimony from 13 alleged victims would be “the most important ruling in the case”.
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Disgraced US megastar Bill Cosby will go on trial June 5, 2017 accused of sexually assaulting a woman at his Philadelphia home more than a decade ago, a judge said Tuesday.
Judge Elizabeth McHugh, presiding in a court in Norristown, Pennsylvania, announced the trial date on Tuesday at the close of a preliminary hearing at which Cosby was present.
When she first stepped forward previous year, Ridgeway Whitedeer said Cosby forced her to perform oral sex on him.
The Montgomery County district attorney’s office asked the court to allow evidence of prior bad acts at Cosby’s trial to demonstrate a “common scheme” similar to the assault Cosby is accused of by former Temple University employee Andrea Constand.
No date has been set for the rulings from the judge.
However, Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill did not immediately rule on any of the pretrial disputes over evidence, including the prosecution effort to call other women as witnesses.
“I got her skin and.it’s just above where you can go under the trousers”, he said in the deposition.
The defense is expected to vehemently oppose such testimony.
Based on detectives’ findings, Ferman ordered Cosby’s arrest on December 30 on three charges of aggravated indecent assault.
Cosby was also asked about the phone call a year later with Constand’s mother in Toronto. He acknowledged having a sexual encounter with Constand, but said it was consensual.
Allred apparently drew the lawyers’ ire by holding a press conference in California Tuesday alongside an actress who claims Cosby sexually assaulted her during a casting meeting in the early 1970s.
Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt brought race into the equation, saying Allred and others have trampled on Cosby’s civil rights.
Lead defense lawyer Brian McMonagle said at the hearing Tuesday that he has other trials booked until June. But his voice could be heard on a recording of a 2004 phone call between himself and Constand’s mother, Gianna, in what became an at-times surreal debate involving Canadians and a parrot.
“My presence here today is to show my appreciation to all of those who managed to get this bill to pass unanimously and in such a timely manner for future generations”, Ridgeway Whitedeer said, according to a transcript of her remarks.
“An individual who, over the course of decades, intentionally intoxicates women in a singular fashion with the intention of sexually assaulting them can not also be mistaken about whether or not those women are consenting to the sexual abuse”, the motion said. Cosby later said it was Benadryl, though Constand’s lawyer doesn’t buy that.
Numerous accusers, including Constand, are white.
Decades later, even though she had evidence of the crime, prosecutors could not take the case to court.
Cosby’s attorneys denounced the fact that prosecutors have not called Constand anew to testify so that they may cross-examine her, a request that the magistrate has previously denied.
They say that it is unlikely that Constand was only under the influence of Benadryl, that she claimed to be suffering from much more severe drugging effects.
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Cosby also has hired a new Los Angeles firm to defend several defamation cases filed by accusers around the country.
