Why Bill Cosby's Conviction Was Thrown Out

welcome once again to lato's law here's steve leto had a whole bunch of people contact me and asked me to talk about the bill cosby situation and uh several people said i know you can't cover this steve but i'm sure you saw it well i can cover it i'm just not gonna get too heavily into the stuff that's non-legal see i'm an attorney i'll talk about the legal aspects of what happened with bill cosby's conviction just the other day so bill cosby's been released from prison after the pennsylvania supreme court overturned his sexual assault conviction the supreme court of pennsylvania overturned his conviction said let him out of jail right now and you cannot retry him and so there's a legal issue going on here and it's kind of complicated but once you hear it i think broken down to its basic terms it'll make sense now whether we agree with everything that everyone's done in the past in this case that's not for us to say i'm simply going to explain to you what the supreme court said why they said it and what their reasoning was and again that's a pennsylvania state supreme court i'm going to go with the version from the philadelphia enquirer but i'll let you know right now i've removed much of their editorializing jeremy roebuck and laura mccrystal wrote this version of the story the 83 year old comedian bill cosby served more than two years of a sentence that could have been up to 10 years in a state prison in montgomery county the pennsylvania supreme court overturned the 2018 conviction on wednesday and they ordered him freed from prison the court made no findings on the factual basis or on the evidence in the case this has nothing to do with the evidence in the case this is extremely important so this ruling by the supreme court did not speak to whether or not they believe one side or the other when it comes to what happened that's extremely important to understand okay we're talking about is a legal issue that's got nothing to do with the credibility of the witnesses so they're saying the victim could be telling the truth 100 percent it doesn't matter she could have been lying 100 percent doesn't matter that is irrelevant to the issues at hand instead they base their decision on a question that has plagued the case from the start whether a prosecutor's decade-old promise that cosby would not be charged in this case whether that prohibited future district attorneys from filing charges against him in this case so there was a prosecutor who was told there's a case he examined all the evidence and came to the conclusion that he didn't think that they could get a conviction decided not to bring charges and that happens quite a bit but for reasons that i'll explain in a second he said we will not charge mr cosby and we'll make a promise never to charge him in exchange for something he's going to do the judge who wrote the opinion for the majority of the pennsylvania supreme court found that that promise was binding and they cited cosby's reliance on that promise when he agreed to give incriminating testimony in a civil case that the victim had filed against him and that testimony was then used in the trial where cosby was convicted so the judge wrote this was an unconstitutional coercive bait and switch noting that such a vast due process violation required an equally drastic remedy ultimately the court barred prosecutors from even retrying cosby on the charges again and that decision drew dissents from three members of the court but that's not the point the point is that the court has ruled and some of the court says they should be allowed to retry him just not use that evidence but they all agree that the conviction needs to be overturned so here's what happened the victim comes forward tells police here's what happened bill cosby attacked me then they take that to the prosecutor prosecutor examines all the evidence because i don't think there's a case here that not not one that we can pursue and get a conviction on but he understands that the victim also wants to sue bill cosby and you can take a witness's deposition in a lawsuit and force them to testify except if a witness is facing criminal charges they can take the fifth and refuse to testify so the prosecutor says so that bill cosby could be forced to testify in the lawsuit we basically said we're not going to prosecute you on the criminal side of this and so bill cosby did in fact sit for i believe more than one deposition where he testified without taking the fifth and so those depositions and that lawsuit apparently led to a fairly large settlement that the victim got in a lawsuit against bill cosby so the district attorney who brought the case that won the conviction actually got elected in 2015 in part by promising to put cosby on trial and he led the prosecution team and now he's quick to point out that cosby's conviction is based not on innocence but rather a procedural issue irrelevant to the facts of the crime well yes that's true his office did not say whether intended to petition the court for a re-hearing on the decision because here's the thing the supreme court said you guys cannot retry him again now there is a process in in many legal systems including most states that if a court makes a ruling you have a time within which you can appeal that ruling but of course if you're at the supreme court there's no place to go beyond that but you can ask them for a re-hearing and the re-hearing is based generally on the idea that the court has made such a horrible mistake that it needs to be corrected the problem of course is that supreme courts don't make horrible mistakes because whatever they do is deemed to be correct so to convince them they made a horrible mistake is very very difficult so technically speaking though that option is still possible where they could petition the court and say look we want you to reconsider this notion of whether or not we can retry him and just retry him without using the excerpts of the deposition testimony because that's what they did at the trial where they convicted him they brought in the transcripts of these depositions that he set for and said okay he's not testifying in court you know here we're going to bring in the transcripts of his of his testimony and show you what he testified to under oath in a lawsuit but the lawsuit was regarding these general circumstances so the issue that brought the case recently had been present from the beginning and uh that began when the victim first reported to police in 2005 uh that she had been assaulted a year earlier and there had been a first trial that ended with a hung jury after days of deliberations and then there was a retrial where a second jury ultimately convicted him so it was the prosecutor whose name is caster when he first heard the reports about the alleged assault he said he doubted her allegations would stand up in court given her delay in reporting them and so he declined to bring it to trial in doing so later caster said that he struck a deal with cosby that he thought could help the victim find justice in a civil lawsuit he said he promised cosby would never be prosecuted because the comedian agreed to sit for a deposition in the civil case without asserting his fifth amendment rights against self-incrimination that case ended with a 3.4 million dollar settlement reportedly there is some argument about how this agreement was formalized and testifying for cosby's defense in 2016 castro asserted that a vaguely worded news release he issued at the time of his decision not to charge cosby was legally binding on all prosecutors who succeeded him in office a montgomery county judge said that caster was not a credible witness and that there was no evidence beyond his word to support that the deal had ever existed well unfortunately the supreme court disagreed with that now they did say that the legal reasoning that the prosecutor used was dubious dubious good word but ruled that what mattered was cosby and his lawyers reasonably believed it to be true and they relied upon it so cosby's team was told look he will not be prosecuted so long as he sits and and and does depositions in the civil case without asserting the fifth and not asserting the fifth prosecutor's thinking is going to help the victim with their lawsuit so cosby goes in and testifies and does not take the fifth so the judge writing for the supreme court wrote when a prosecutor makes an unconditional promise of non-prosecution and when the defendant relies upon that guarantee to the detriment of his constitutional right not to testify our criminal justice system demands that the promise be enforced excerpts from cosby's deposition in the civil case were ultimately used against cosby at trial but the damage went far beyond that the judge wrote prompting the majority's decision to bar a retrial now a couple dissenting judges say that they agree that cosby's conviction should be overturned but they think they should be allowed to retry him just without using the transcripts from the civil case but they're in a minority on that one so that'll lose the dissent wrote if district attorneys had the power to dole out irrevocable get out of jail free cards at will and without judicial oversight it would invite a host of abuses the judge wrote adding in a footnote that one might reasonably wonder if such abuses were at work in this case particularly given caster's odd and ever shifting explanations for his actions caster meanwhile said he felt vindicated by the court's decision but remains indifferent about cosby's release he said i don't feel any regret that he got out i don't feel any satisfaction that he got out he has no feelings either way so in case you're curious the opinion of the case written by the supreme court in pennsylvania is available to be read online it is 79 pages long i invite you to read it spent the better part of the afternoon yesterday my desk reading a thing on my screen uh but the notion that people are granted immunity of some sort or another uh is something you're gonna recognize as also being done in front of grand juries so when a grand jury has been seated to investigate a crime let's suppose there's some crime syndicate someplace i'm giving you a hypothetical nothing to do with cosby trial crimes syndicate someplace there's a kingpin and a bunch of lieutenants and a bunch of foot soldiers who do the actual criminal work but they want to get the people at the top so they grab a couple of the foot soldiers and they bring them into court and they say look uh we're gonna put in front of a grand jury and you're testifying from the ground you're gonna tell us what you know as we investigate this crime the grand jury's gonna eventually issue indictments and our goal is to get the people who run that criminal organization and they bring in a guy who's a foot soldier in that organization they go tell us what you do and he crosses his arms because i'm not going to testify i take the fifth now here's the problem there's a good chance that that person if my facts i just gave you are true probably has broken the law because he's part of criminal organization that's my hypothetical so as part of a criminal organization probably is guilty of something so asking that person to testify compelling them to testify would violate the fifth amendment but for years our courts have said oh in this case you can make the decision a prosecutor can make the decision that if this person is not the person really going after and it would make sense to grant them immunity in an attempt to get the people above them we can do that so you give this person a break and say look we won't charge you for anything you say in here in this courtroom in this grand jury proceeding and these are closed sealed from the public and you're going to testify and nothing you say will be used against you can be using enough will grant you immunity now the person takes a fifth you go what are you taking the fifth for you can't be prosecuted you've got immunity and then a judge can hold the person in contempt and say you've been granted immunity you've got no right to take the fifth because your only excuse to take the fifth is i don't wanna be forced to testify against myself but if you cannot be prosecuted you ain't testifying against yourself you can't be so that happens a lot and that puts those foot soldiers in an uncomfortable situation because they have to go wait a second now my choice is sing like a bird and people above you'll be very upset or take the contempt charge and you hear about that also and so that's another story altogether but the real issue here is that this is an unusual situation and this prosecutor probably should have done something a little more with this such as gone into court and put it on the record okay and so if the prosecutor's working with cosby's attorneys and they have this agreement you would formalize it by the parties coming into court and the judge would come out call the case and the prosecutor would then say we've had a discussion with the other side's attorneys and there's as you know potential criminal charges and potential civil charges lawsuit and we've we've struck a deal where he's going to testify if we agree not to prosecute and then a judge would look at that and go okay does that make sense does it comport pennsylvania law is this uh good for public policy does this make sense and a judge could look at that and go no no it's not how we do this judge could do that or a judge could say okay uh why don't you explain to me why you think this case wouldn't work as a criminal prosecution but you think it might work as a civil and one of the most obvious reasons there of course is that there's different standards of proof okay criminal of course beyond a reasonable doubt and in a civil case it's the preponderance more likely than not that's why a lot of times you'll hear about somebody being exonerated found not guilty in trial but hit with a big big judgment in a civil lawsuit so there you go so that's what happened with bill cosby uh again the court did not address did not weigh in on did not talk about did not touch anything to do the credibility of the witnesses in this case and they ain't saying we don't believe them they're simply saying there's a problem because a prosecutor did tell bill cosby and his attorneys that if you sit for depositions in this case we will not prosecute you and the court's saying if that agreement was made and bill cosby relied upon it then the future district attorneys are bound by that otherwise what do you got so it is a very unusual turn of events he spent a couple of years in prison but he's out now and they cannot retry him for that case from the philadelphia enquirer uh jeremy roebuck and lauren mcchrystal wrote it bill cosby's released from prison after the pennsylvania supreme court overturns his sexual assault conviction it was sent to me by everyone d wilburn mark jennifer caleb uh farsights philip paul david greg mark randy jesse and steve not me uh questions or comments put them below let me talk to you later bye-bye thank you for watching lato's law experience is something you don't get until just after you need it

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 124,867

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, http://www.lehtoslaw.com, steve lehto

Id: trS2ZqdW4mw

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021