EDITORIAL: The legal lessons of the Cosby debacle

Jul. 3—Bill Cosby is at home now, free from SCI Phoenix for the first time in more than two years after a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision Wednesday overturned his sexual assault conviction.

The move did not come because of new evidence or something that fell apart in the case that sent him to prison. Among 60 women who say the television legend committed an array of sexual crimes against them over decades, it was just one — then Temple University employee Andrea Constand — whose story of being drugged and sexually assaulted brought down "America's Dad."

What sent him home was a technicality, like a plot twist in a movie. The justices didn't say Cosby, 83, was innocent. They said the prosecutors made a mistake.

Constand's assault occurred in 2004. In 2005, she reported it, and the Montgomery County district attorney, then Bruce Castor, said he wouldn't prosecute, but lined up the dominoes for Constand to file a civil suit. Cosby testified without the shield of the Fifth Amendment because prosecution was off the table.

In 2015, a new DA brought the case back from the dead. After two trials, Cosby was found guilty on three counts in 2018 and seemed destined to end his life behind bars. But now the state Supreme Court said Castor's decision meant the prosecutors couldn't take it to a jury without violating Cosby's right to due process.

There is plenty of speculation about the ruling. Did the justices get it right? Did Castor — who was serving as Pennsylvania's solicitor general and briefly attorney general as the Cosby case marched toward trial — screw it all up in 2005? Did a DA have any business setting a civil scenario in motion?

But prosecutors everywhere should be looking at the Cosby case as exactly what the actor specialized in on "Fat Albert" or "The Cosby Show." It's an object lesson — a morality play with a kind of public service takeaway.

All the performances in court and the deliberations in the jury room mean nothing if they stray outside the parameters of the law's rules.

Achieving a conviction might be a win for a prosecutor, but for victims of crime there is no victory. It is only a way to try to get back some semblance of what was lost or to heal what was broken. The ramifications of the Cosby case could be felt far beyond Montgomery County and the 60 women who came forward against a celebrity.

"This particular moment, for many people who know how hard it was to get the conviction in the first place, deters them sometimes because they don't know if it's worth the emotional trauma that they go through," said Lisa Perry, executive director of Pittsburgh Action Against Rape.

Sexual crimes in particular are often hard for victims to report because of the fear of what comes next — disbelief, judgment, reliving it all in court. To do that with the added risk of having the conviction snatched back months or years later could be more than some victims could handle, and it is dangerous for everyone to have sex crimes go unpressed.

The only way prosecutors can counteract this is by staying strictly inside the lines of the law to make cases like Cosby's an aberration.

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