It took two days of hearings for Judge Steven O’Neill to decide that Cosby’s case must move forward – and determine if he’ll stand trial for the sexual assault charges levied against him, despite Cosby’s team’s pleas that he should have some kind of immunity allegedly verbally granted by a previous district attorney, reports the Associated Press.
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Cosby, 78, was arrested and charged in December with drugging and sexually violating former Temple University athletic department employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.
The sexual assault case in Pennsylvania against Bill Cosby will go forward, a judge in Montgomery County ruled Wednesday.
He could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
In the deposition he admitted acquiring Quaaludes with the intent of giving them to young women he wanted to have sex with.
O’Neill issued his ruling after a hard-fought two-day hearing. Castor told the court that Constand had “ruined her credibility” by going to a lawyer and that the civil agreement offered the best possible justice.
Bill Cosby is not off the hook yet.
Thomas Bergstrom, a former assistant USA attorney and one of the city’s most prominent criminal defense lawyers, said that in all of his career, both as a government prosecutor and as a defense lawyer, he had never been party to such an offer.
Montgomery County district attorney (DA) Bruce Castor purportedly promised never to prosecute Cosby after he said there was “insufficient credible and admissible evidence” in the case.
The decision, Castor said, was made to create an atmosphere that would induce Cosby to testify in Constand’s civil litigation against him and allow Constand to prevail civilly and “make a lot of money”.
Coincidentally, on the same day Goins dropped her suit, a judge in Los Angeles ordered Cosby to undergo a second deposition in a lawsuit brought by Judy Huth, who claims Cosby assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974. He said he reached into her trousers but insisted it was consensual.
Stopping short of calling his decision an “agreement”, Castor claimed he alone as a “sovereign” entity, an aspect of common law, had the authority to make a binding decision.
She backed the prosecution’s assertion that the press release was not an agreement, and she never heard about charges being precluded until the case came back into the limelight in 2005.
Bill Cosby’s top lawyer says he thought criminal charges were off the table when he let the comedian testify in a lawsuit over a Pennsylvania woman’s claim he sexually assaulted her.
Risa Ferman, now a county judge, worked on the Constand case before succeeding Castor as district attorney in 2008.
Troiani said she believed Castor refrained from pushing ahead with prosecution because of his political interests.
In deciding not to bring charges, he said, he meant to protect Cosby from prosecution “for all time”. “I want them to win”.
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“A promise of a prosecutor, even an oral promise, is absolutely 100 percent enforceable”, Christopher Tayback, one of Cosby’s lawyers, told O’Neill.
