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    Pennsylvania School Board Reinstates Gay Author’s Speech Amid Backlash

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    The Cumberland Valley School Board reversed its decision to cancel Maulik Pancholy’s speech at a middle school next month after many community members said the actor had been discriminated against because of his sexuality.Less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania school board unanimously voted to cancel a gay author’s anti-bullying speech at a middle school, the board voted Wednesday night to reverse its decision and reinstate the event amid pressure from parents, students and administrators.The 5-to-4 vote by the Cumberland Valley School District’s board came in front of scores of community members who packed a high school auditorium and, for several hours, chastised the board for having canceled the event featuring the actor and author Maulik Pancholy over what they said were homophobic concerns.Bud Shaffner, a board member who had come under fire for introducing the motion at the April 15 meeting to cancel the speech, apologized for his comments about Mr. Pancholy’s “lifestyle.” He later introduced the motion to reinstate the speech and voted for it.“I will accept the blame because of the insensitive word I spoke on April 15,” he said at the beginning of Wednesday’s meeting. “I fully understand the interpretation of my poor word choice.”Many community members who spoke during the public comment period of Wednesday’s meeting rejected the contention by some board members that Mr. Pancholy’s speech had been canceled over concerns about what they called his “political activism.”“To claim that Maulik Pancholy is a political activist and use that as a justification to cancel his event is an excuse that the public sees through,” one person told the board.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Will Not Review Decision to Overturn Bill Cosby’s Conviction

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      Prosecutors had appealed a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which had overturned the conviction on due process grounds.The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the bid by prosecutors in Pennsylvania to reinstate Bill Cosby’s conviction for sexual assault, a decision that ends the criminal case that had led to imprisonment for the man once known as America’s Dad.In an order issued Monday, the court said, without elaborating, that it had declined to hear the appeal filed by prosecutors last November.The Supreme Court’s decision leaves in place a ruling issued by an appellate court in Pennsylvania last year that had overturned Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction on due process grounds, allowing Mr. Cosby, 84, to walk free after serving nearly three years of a three-to-10-year prison sentence.Mr. Cosby had been found guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home outside Philadelphia, though his lawyers argued at trial that the encounter, in 2004, had been consensual.The case, one of the first high-profile criminal prosecutions of the #MeToo era, drew widespread attention, in part because of Mr. Cosby’s celebrity and in part because dozens of women had over a period of years leveled similar accusations of sexual abuse against the entertainer. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last June that Mr. Cosby’s due process rights had been violated when the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office pursued a criminal case against him despite what the appellate court found was a binding verbal promise not to prosecute given to him by a previous district attorney.The former district attorney, Bruce L. Castor Jr., who said he believed Ms. Constand but was not sure he could win a conviction, said he had agreed years ago not to press charges against Mr. Cosby to induce him to testify in a civil case brought by Ms. Constand. He said the substance of his promise was contained in a news release he issued at the time that said he found insufficient credible and admissible evidence. But he held out the possibility of a civil action “with a much lower standard of proof.” Ms. Constand later received $3.38 million as part of a settlement in her civil case against Mr. Cosby.During the civil case, Mr. Cosby acknowledged giving narcotics to women as part of an effort to have sex with them, a statement that was later introduced as evidence at Mr. Cosby’s trial.Understand Bill Cosby’s Sexual Assault CaseBill Cosby was released from prison June 30, 2021, after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his 2018 conviction for sexual assault.Why He Was Released: Here’s a breakdown of the issues surrounding the ruling to overturn the conviction.What Legal Analysts Think: The court’s decision opened an unusually vigorous debate among the legal community.His Uncertain Future: Experts say it’s unlikely the ruling will change the public perception of the former star.The Aftermath: The Times critic Wesley Morris looks at what to do with our fondness for “The Cosby Show,” and W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series contextualizes his legacy.Following Mr. Cosby’s conviction in 2018, an intermediate appeals court in Pennsylvania found that no formal agreement never to prosecute had ever existed, a position that aligned with what the trial court had ruled.But in a 6-to-1 ruling, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that Mr. Cosby had, in fact, relied on Mr. Castor’s assurances that he wouldn’t be prosecuted, and that charging Mr. Cosby and using his testimony concerning drugs at the criminal trial had violated his due process rights.Prosecutors had argued that such a promise had never been made. They said that no one else in the district attorney’s office at the time had been made aware of it and that a news release could not be the basis of a formal immunity agreement.A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, welcomed the decision Monday, saying in a statement that the entertainer and his family “would like to offer our sincere gratitude to the justices of the United States Supreme Court for following the rules of law and protecting the Constitutional Rights of ALL American Citizens.”Ms. Constand and her lawyers released a statement Monday that criticized the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling, in particular faulting the panel for assuming “there was a valid agreement not to prosecute, which was vigorously disputed in the Habeas proceedings, and determined by the trial judge not to exist.”Andrea Constand and her lawyers have consistently taken issue with the reasoning of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in overturning Mr. Cosby’s conviction.Angela Lewis for The New York TimesThe Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, released a statement in which he expressed his appreciation to Ms. Constand and described petitioning for Supreme Court review as “the right thing to do,” even though there was only a small chance the court would take up the case.“All crime victims deserve to be heard, treated with respect and be supported through their day in court,” the statement continued. “I wish her the best as she moves forward in her life.”Mr. Cosby was first accused in 2005 of having molested Ms. Constand, then an employee of the Temple University basketball team for whom he had become a mentor. The case was reopened in 2015, and Mr. Cosby went through two trials, the first of which ended with a hung jury. The second ended in April 2018, with a jury in Montgomery County convicting Mr. Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault.Both cases were closely watched by many of the women who came forward with similar accusations but statutes of limitations in their cases made further prosecutions unlikely.Mr. Cosby has consistently denied the accusations that he was a sexual predator, suggesting that any encounters were completely consensual.Patricia Leary Steuer, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said in an interview on Monday that she felt “a little let down by the decision” but that “it does not change anything for me and the other survivors” since, she said, public sentiment is on their side.“The survivors did what we were supposed to do which was to come forward and tell the truth and that’s what we did,” she said. “The rest is out of our hands.”Legal experts had predicted it would be unlikely that the Supreme Court, which denies the vast majority of petitions for review, would take up the Cosby case. For one thing, they said, the case involved a unique set of circumstances that did not necessarily raise far-reaching constitutional issues.Dennis McAndrews, a Pennsylvania lawyer and former prosecutor who has followed the case, said the Supreme Court typically “looks to determine whether there are compelling issues of constitutional law about which the courts across the country need additional guidance, especially if the case is capable of repetition.”Shan Wu, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, said the Supreme Court likely considered whether its ruling would have the potential for broader significance outside the parameters of this case. “It’s a very unique set of circumstances,” he said. “It’s highly unlikely to be repeated.” More

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      Betty Davis, Raw Funk Innovator, Is Dead at 77

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      “Nasty Gal” and her two other 1970s albums influenced generations of R&B and hip-hop.Betty Davis, the singer and songwriter whose raunchy persona, fierce funk grooves and Afrofuturistic style in the early 1970s made her a forerunner of R&B and hip-hop to come, died on Wednesday in Homestead, Pa., the town outside Pittsburgh where she had lived. She was 77.Her reissue label, Light in the Attic, distributed a statement from her friend of 65 years, Connie Portis, announcing the death of a “pioneer rock star, singer, songwriter and fashion icon.” The cause was not specified. Ms. Davis, who first recorded as Betty Mabry, got her last name from her one-year marriage to the jazz bandleader Miles Davis. The music she made in the early 1970s didn’t bring her nationwide hits, but it directly presaged the uninhibited funk of musicians from Prince to Janet Jackson to Janelle Monáe.On the three albums she released from 1973 to 1975, Ms. Davis growled, moaned, teased and rasped through songs that were lascivious, bluesy and hardheaded. She posed in lingerie, in neo-Egyptian regalia and in space-warrior garb, with her hair in a towering Afro; she performed in silvery thigh-high boots, short shorts and a bustier. The poet Saul Williams described her as “the burning secret of Black womanhood and sensuality as expressed through song.”In a 2018 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Davis said, “I wrote about love, really, and all the levels of love,” proudly including carnality. “When I was writing about it, nobody was writing about it. But now everybody’s writing about it.”In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued Ms. Davis’s albums with her approval.“Nasty Gal” would be her last studio album released near the time it was recorded, and she never had a certified hit. As the 1980s began, she left the music business almost completely. Yet listeners and musicians have repeatedly rediscovered her, and Davis gained ever-increasing respect as her music was sampled — by Ice Cube, Method Man and Lenny Kravitz among others — and reissued. “This lady was hip before hip was hip,” Mr. Kravitz tweeted.She was born Betty Gray Mabry on July 26, 1944, in Durham, N.C., to Henry and Betty Mabry and grew up in rural North Carolina and in Homestead. Her father was a steelworker, her mother a nurse. In the 2017 documentary film “Betty: They Say I’m Different,” she recalled listening as a little girl to the blues and rock ’n’ roll — Big Mama Thornton, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Chuck Berry — and singing along with the record player. She was 12 when she wrote her first song, “Bake a Cake of Love,” and she sang in local talent shows.As a teenager, Ms. Mabry went o New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology; she brought along a notebook full of songs. She worked as a model for the Wilhelmina agency, appearing in Glamour and Seventeen magazines and as a pinup in Jet magazine. She also worked as a club hostess, and she savored the city’s 1960s nightlife and met figures like Andy Warhol and Jimi Hendrix.Her first single, in 1964, was “The Cellar.” According to Danielle Maggio, an ethnomusicologist and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh who wrote her dissertation on Ms. Davis, the song was named after a private club at Broadway and West 90th Street. Ms. Mabry became its M.C., disc jockey and hostess, and the club drew artists, musicians and athletes.In 1967, the Chambers Brothers recorded one of her songs, “Uptown.” The South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, then her boyfriend, produced a 1968 single for her, “Live, Love, Learn.”Ms. Davis with her husband, Miles Davis, at their home in New York in 1969. During their yearlong marriage she introduced him to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.Baron Wolman/Getty ImagesShe met Miles Davis at a jazz club and became his second wife in 1968. A photograph of her is the cover of Davis’s 1969 album, “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” which includes a tune titled “Mademoiselle Mabry.” Ms. Davis introduced her husband to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.While Mr. Davis was working on a later album, he considered calling it “Witches Brew”; his wife suggested “Bitches Brew,” the title that stuck. She also convinced him to trade the dapper suits of his previous career for flashier contemporary fashion. “I filled the trash with his suits,” she recalled in the documentary.Mr. Davis encouraged her to perform. In 1969, he produced sessions for her, choosing musicians including Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter from Davis’s quintet and Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox from Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. His label, Columbia Records, rejected the results, which remained unreleased until 2016.The marriage was turbulent and sometimes violent before ending in 1969. “Miles was pure energy, sometimes light but also dark,” Ms. Davis recalled in the documentary. “Every day married to him was a day I earned the name Davis.”She kept the name as she returned to songwriting. Material she wrote for the Commodores brought her an offer to record for Motown, but she turned it down because she insisted on keeping her publishing rights.Ms. Davis subsequently moved to London — where a new boyfriend, Eric Clapton, offered to produce an album for her — and then to the Bay Area, where Michael Lang, who had promoted the 1969 Woodstock festival, signed her to his label, Just Sunshine. Greg Errico, the drummer from Sly and the Family Stone, produced her debut album, “Betty Davis”; it opened with “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” and included “Anti Love Song,” which warned, “Just as hard as I’d fall for you, boy/Well you know you’d fall for me harder.”Ms. Davis wrote all the songs on her albums, and she produced the next two herself: “They Say I’m Different” and “Nasty Gal,” which brought her to a major label, Island Records. The music and arrangements were hers; she sang each part to her band members. Her songs were aggressive, jaggedly syncopated funk that was anything but shy. In “Nasty Gal,” she boasted, “You said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you.”But while Davis conquered club audiences, she found little traction on radio, denying her any commercial success. In 1976, she recorded another album, which included the autobiographical “Stars Starve, You Know.” The song complains, “They said if I wanted to make some money/I’d have to clean up my act.”Island shelved the album, which went unreleased until 2009, and dropped Ms. Davis. “The doors in the industry kept closing,” she said in the film. “All these white men behind desks telling me to change. Change my look, change my sound. ‘Change your music, Betty.’”In 1979, she found independent financing to make another album, “Crashin’ With Passion,” recording it in Los Angeles with musicians including Mr. Hancock, Martha Reeves (of Martha and the Vandellas) and the Pointer Sisters; it, too, went unreleased. Ms. Davis felt that the music business was done with her. In 2018, she said: “When I was told that it was over, I just accepted it. And nobody else was knocking at my door.”The death of her father, in 1980, deepened her isolation and depression. On a yearlong visit to Japan in the early 1980s, she played some club dates with a Japanese band, her last live performances. She left no immediate survivors.But as the decades passed, she was far from forgotten. In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued her albums with her approval, along with the Columbia sessions produced by Mr. Davis and her unreleased 1976 album, “Is It Love or Desire.” Hip-hop samples made clear how hard-hitting her productions still sounded, and the 2017 documentary brought new affirmations that Ms. Davis had been ahead of her time.“Being different is everything,” she said in the film. “It is the way forward.” More

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      Andrea Constand on Her Memoir and Cosby's Overturned Conviction

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      The call came just before noon.Andrea Constand had returned to her downtown Toronto apartment after walking her dog Maddy in a nearby park, when the Montgomery County district attorney’s office rang. Stand by, she was told, a ruling on Bill Cosby’s appeal could be handed down soon by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.By this day, June 30, Constand, the woman whose account of sexual assault had led to the conviction of the man once known as America’s Dad was finding ways to move past the trauma that the trial had brought to her daily life. She had sold her apartment, was moving to the countryside north of the city and preparing to publish a memoir, “The Moment,” to detail her singular experience with Cosby and the criminal justice system.Though more than 50 women had accused Cosby of sexual misconduct, including assault, prosecutors had — for a variety of reasons — only successfully brought criminal charges in her case. And now Cosby was in prison far away, serving a three- to 10-year sentence in Pennsylvania after having been found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault.He had already lost an appeal. The dust once kicked up by the trial, by the verdict, by the media attention, by the focus on her case as a breakthrough “moment” for the #MeToo era, had largely settled.About an hour later, the phone rang again.“Andrea,” said Kate Delano, the district attorney’s director of communications, “the Supreme Court has vacated his conviction.”It is perhaps an understatement to say that for Constand, and many others, the decision came as a shock. Cosby would not only be freed: The court also ruled he could not be tried again. Constand said she found it deeply unsettling that Cosby, still a man of means and influence, was out of prison, unconstrained and able to contact her and others.“I had a lump in my throat,” Constand, 48, said in a rare in-depth interview last month near her new home north of Toronto. “I really felt they were setting a predator loose and that made me sick.”Bill Cosby with his lawyers outside his home in a Philadelphia suburb after being released from prison.Mark Makela/ReutersConstand’s reaction to the court decision and her long experience with the case are detailed in the memoir, which is to be released Tuesday.Within minutes of the second call, Constand drove off, heading with her 22-year-old niece to her sister’s home outside Toronto, a trip that had been planned before the afternoon became untethered by the ruling. From the car, she spoke by phone with the two former prosecutors who had helped lead the case against Cosby, Stewart Ryan and Kristen Gibbons Feden. They explained that Cosby would no longer be officially designated as a sexually violent predator, a status that requires lifetime public registration and community notification — something that had afforded Constand special comfort.Andrea Constand said she has no regrets about pursuing the case, despite the court’s decision. “Society paid attention,” she said. Angela Lewis for The New York TimesAt her sister’s house, she watched on television as Cosby got out of a car at his home near Philadelphia, the mansion where, she had testified, Cosby assaulted her after giving her a sedative in 2004. From her sister’s back porch, she worked over the phone with her two lawyers, Bebe H. Kivitz and Dolores M. Troiani, to put out a statement expressing their disappointment.Her phone was otherwise blowing up with calls from friends and other women who had accused Cosby of sexual assault. Kevin R. Steele, the district attorney who had overseen the prosecution, had called earlier to say the decision did not take away from what she had achieved.Still she worried, she said, that other women might find it too hard to come forward now. “It was not just me,” she said, “it was the message that it would send to the rest of the world and other survivors, to say, why should I fight for justice, when it ultimately gets stripped down. It won’t matter.”The first trial in her case had ended with a hung jury. Cosby’s defense team insisted his encounter with Constand had been consensual. For the second trial, prosecutors were allowed to introduce testimony from five additional women who, like Constand, said that Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them.When the jury in the second trial found him guilty in 2018, many thought that, were there to be any appellate ruling, it would likely focus on whether it had been prejudicial to allow the women from other incidents to testify — evidence that prosecutors said showed a pattern of abuse.The book is being released on Tuesday.Penguin Random HouseBut the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on different grounds, finding that the district attorney had been bound by what a predecessor had called a promise he made never to charge Cosby in the case. The predecessor said he had made the promise to persuade Cosby to testify in a subsequent civil action, which Cosby settled by paying Constand $3.38 million. During his testimony in the civil case, Cosby acknowledged giving women quaaludes as part of an effort to have sex with them, a statement that the June ruling said had been unfairly introduced at the 2018 trial.Constand does not mince her words when it comes to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. She blames it for undoing all the work she and others had done to bring Cosby to justice and for “putting him on the street.”“After a few deep breaths, I just felt this is not my problem,” she said. “Now it made me feel the shame is on the Supreme Court. It’s not on me anymore.”The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said in its decision that it was upholding an important safeguard: Cosby’s due process rights had been violated. Its ruling was meant to prevent dangerous prosecutorial overreach.Constand said that for days after the decision she fielded emails, texts and phone calls from people who were irate about the ruling. Many were from women who say they too were assaulted by Cosby and who had viewed the 2018 guilty verdict as justice for themselves. Some were now her friends. “They were devastated, they were so angry,” she said.The book, just weeks from its release date, had to be updated. A publisher’s note described the ruling and said Cosby’s conviction had been overturned “on a procedural issue.”Constand and supporters celebrated after Cosby was found guilty in April 2018.Pool photo by Mark MakelaThe statement Constand had devised with her lawyers was added as were about 400 words to describe her reaction to the court’s decision.“We cannot let moments of injustice quiet us,” she wrote. “We must speak up again and again and again — until we arrive at a moment of real change.”The case accounts for roughly two-thirds of the 240-page book. Constand takes readers inside her tussles with defense attorneys, who cast her as a disappointed lover in the first trial and a gold digger in the second. She describes the connections she felt with jurors, the long stays in hotel rooms, the stress and the sacrifices her family had to make.She got through it, she writes, with the help of her poodles, her spirituality and tattoos that give her strength. (The word “truth” is displayed across the top of her chest, a large phoenix on her back.)The book spends some time on her childhood in Canada, her years as a basketball player at the University of Arizona and playing professionally in Italy. It also delves into her relationships and coming out as gay.The memoir discusses other parts of Constand’s life, such as her success as a high school and college basketball player.Ron Bull/The Toronto Star, via Associated In the memoir, Constand describes herself as “wearied and weathered by what happened to me” and writes that Cosby had robbed a joyful young woman, the product of a nourishing family and happy childhood, of her smile. During an interview with The New York Times, she credited her faith for sustaining her and talked of starting a new chapter of her life.Constand started the book, helped by a co-writer, Meg Masters, more than a year before the court’s June decision, at the start of the pandemic lockdown, as a way to get closure.“The healer in me knew I had to dive back into everything again and really try to remember and it was really chilling for me at times,” she said. “Trauma is not wired for you to remember. It’s wired for you to forget.”During the writing, she got Covid-19 and was sick on her couch in Toronto for six weeks with “an elephant on my chest.” The experience, the encounter with her own mortality, propelled her to finish the book.“I thought it was important to write the story for other survivors who had stories, too,” she said. “I wanted to be a symbol of hope to them. That their stories matter. And their stories are important.”Despite the court’s decision, she said the years of hard work were by no means wasted. Cosby, now 84, served nearly three years in prison, she pointed out. Publicity from the case helped change attitudes. Women were encouraged to come forward. People believed them when they did. Several of the Cosby accusers helped with successful legislative efforts to extend or eliminate states’ statutes of limitations in sexual assault cases.“There were so many victories along the way,” she said. “Society paid attention.”In her memoir, Constand writes that Cosby had robbed a joyful young woman, the product of a nourishing family and happy childhood, of her smile. Angela Lewis for The New York TimesSince the court’s decision, Cosby has said he wants to re-emerge as a truly public personality, which Constand would have to contend with. He has taken to social media to proclaim the ruling a vindication of his innocence, an overstatement of the decision, which found he had not been given a fair trial, but did not exonerate him.But he still has 3.2 million Twitter followers, and the day after the decision he posted a clip of Constand talking about the night she said she was assaulted. It was paired with a statement that took issue with media reporting on his case.Constand said the posting showed a man emboldened by his new freedom who was trying to use it to damage her reputation.On the same day, she retweeted a post from her sexual abuse support foundation that said “Bill Cosby is not innocent.”But, otherwise, after a modest amount of publicity associated with her book, she said she intends to regain her privacy. She is not planning a book tour and said she wants to focus on her massage therapy business, which was hurt by the pandemic, and a nonprofit foundation she started, Hope Healing and Transformation. It provides resources for survivors of sexual assault, such as a library to help understand trauma, connections to lawyers and a platform for writing their stories. Some of the proceeds from her memoir are going to the foundation.She says it was her destiny to take on Cosby, in what was a “David and Goliath situation.”But would she do it again?Prosecutors are examining the possibility of appeal. If they won, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to block a third trial could be overturned. And Constand said she might put herself through another trial if asked, but it would be a difficult decision and she would have to consult her family.“Yeah, I would do it all over again,” she said. “If it was to do the right thing. I would do anything, as long as it was for the right reason.”Whatever happens, she says, the fact that Cosby walked free should not change what the case achieved.“I hope it doesn’t deter anybody,” she said. “I hope people will still find their voices. I hope that they don’t look at his freedom as a reason not to come forward. Quite the contrary, I hope they feel if Andrea can do it, I can do it.” More

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      Reasoning to Release Bill Cosby From Prison Disputed by Some Legal Analysts

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      The court decision that reversed the sexual assault conviction of Bill Cosby has prompted an unusual level of legal debate about the appropriate parameters of appellate review.The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Bill Cosby’s conviction has opened an unusually vigorous debate among the legal community in that state, and beyond, with critics suggesting the justices had overstepped their bounds in reversing findings of fact embraced by the trial court.Since being freed from prison last month, Cosby, 84, has tried to portray the decision as a full exoneration.But the court did not find Cosby to be innocent of charges he had drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand at his home outside Philadelphia in 2004.What it found was that prosecutors had violated Cosby’s due process rights by ignoring an oral promise a prior district attorney, Bruce L. Castor Jr., says he made to Cosby in 2005, assuring him that he would be immune from prosecution in the case.Castor said he had determined there was insufficient evidence to charge Cosby. Castor hoped, he said, that by promising immunity he would remove Cosby’s ability to cite his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and induce him to testify in any civil suit Constand might file.Constand did file suit, and Cosby testified, acknowledging giving quaaludes to women he wanted to have sex with. At his criminal trial more than a decade later, prosecutors entered that statement into evidence.The Supreme Court ruled that Cosby had relied on Castor’s assurances when he provided the potentially incriminating evidence and that Castor’s successors, bound by his promise, should never have charged Cosby years later.But critics of the decision say that, unlike two lower courts, the justices ignored compelling reasons to question whether such a promise of immunity ever existed.“I think the court was in error and read the case incorrectly,” said Lynne M. Abraham, a former Philadelphia district attorney and judge. “The court’s decision was a terrible blow to victims and a blow to prosecutors’ ability to prosecute someone where the evidence tended to show he was a predator and when all sorts of things suggested there wasn’t a promise.”The Supreme Court decided to reverse Cosby’s sexual assault conviction because it found that Cosby had relied on a 2005 promise of immunity from Bruce L. Castor Jr., the district attorney at the time.Matt Rourke/Associated PressWhat is more, these critics say the court overstepped its traditional bounds as an appeals tribunal in reversing the findings of fact by the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, the trial court that had decided no binding promise existed. Appellate courts typically do not overturn findings of fact by the trial court if they are backed by the record. They serve to examine whether lower courts correctly interpreted the law and followed the procedures to ensure a fair trial. The facts, many legal analysts argue, are best determined by the trial court, which has heard witnesses and overseen evidence in person.“The most fundamental thing that struck me,” said Dennis McAndrews, a Pennsylvania lawyer and former prosecutor, “was they said the trial judge’s findings were supported by the record and they were bound by them and then they went off and made their own factual findings. It’s exceptional to see an appellate court go to such lengths to find their own facts.”Several veteran Pennsylvania-based lawyers said they could not remember a Supreme Court decision that had spurred so much second-guessing. Some law experts have taken to Twitter to publish critiques of the decision.Reaction to the ruling has been strong outside legal circles too, especially among the more than 50 other women who have accused Cosby of sexual abuse and who, because the statutes of limitations had run out, viewed the Constand case as perhaps their last shot at justice.In the midst of it all, the chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Max Baer, decided to discuss the ruling on television — a rarity for judges. He defended it and called Cosby’s prosecution a “reprehensible bait and switch” by the government.To be sure, there are lawyers who agree with him and who applaud the court’s 6-1 ruling, a notable consensus on a difficult matter. They believe it delivered a strong message about prosecutorial overreach — about district attorneys’ sticking by the promises they make, even if those promises were ill-advised. “They got it right on the due process violation because what Castor did was basically a promise,” said David Rudovsky, a defense attorney and senior fellow at University of Pennsylvania Law School.But the “promise” remains a matter of much dispute.Castor said that, although he believed Constand’s account, she had hurt her credibility as a complainant by waiting a year to report Cosby and by continuing to have contact with him after the alleged assault. He said he decided he could not secure a conviction, so he made the promise, he said, as a tactic to get Constand a measure of justice in the civil case.But the promise was never written down. The prosecutor who handled the Cosby investigation with Castor, his chief deputy, Risa Vetri Ferman, said he never told her about it. Castor pointed to a news release he had issued announcing the end of the criminal investigation as evidence that an immunity agreement existed. But the news release does not mention anything about immunity. It does mention the anticipated civil case.Daniel Filler, dean of Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, said one has to question whether the average person would have gotten the benefit of the doubt that Cosby did. “Because there is no documentation that this promise was made, only this public statement that does not track exactly with what Castor said,” he said.Castor said he briefed one of Cosby’s lawyers at the time about his plan to offer Cosby immunity. But the lawyer, Walter Phillips, was dead by the time the promise became an issue and Cosby was criminally charged in 2015. Another of Cosby’s lawyers from the original case, John Schmitt, testified that Phillips had told him about it.Castor said he also discussed the immunity arrangement at the time with Constand’s lawyers. The two lawyers, Dolores M. Troiani and Bebe H. Kivitz, denied that.Andrea Constand, left, and her lawyer Dolores Troiani. The lawyer has denied that Castor told her about the promise of immunity he says he made to Cosby.Matt Slocum/Associated PressGiven that there was no written immunity agreement, several lawyers said they found it odd that Cosby never drew attention to the promise he had secured before taking questions at his deposition in the civil case. Constand’s civil case ended in 2006 in a settlement under which she received $3.38 million. During the negotiations, court papers show that Cosby’s lawyers sought to include a provision barring her from cooperating with any future law enforcement investigation, though by Castor’s account, the lawyers had already secured immunity for their client.Critics of the Supreme Court’s decision point to what they say are the inconsistent explanations Castor gave about what he had agreed to. When the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office reopened the investigation into Cosby, Castor alerted the office that its prosecution might be hampered by a promise he had made. Castor was at the time campaigning to regain his former post as district attorney against an opponent who later made Castor’s decision not to prosecute Cosby in 2005 an issue in the race. Castor told the office in an email that his agreement with Cosby meant that the deposition testimony could not be used against the entertainer. But he said he had not given Cosby full immunity.“Naturally, if a prosecution could be made out without using what Cosby said, or anything derived from what Cosby said, I believed then and continue to believe that a prosecution is not precluded,” Castor wrote in the email.A few months later in court, he testified that, actually, the promise had extended full immunity to Cosby.The trial judge ultimately ruled in 2016 that Castor’s explanations of the agreement, and Schmitt’s corroborating testimony, were not credible.In an interview, Castor denied he had been inconsistent and said his meaning had always been that Cosby could never be prosecuted on the Constand charges. “The only way to guarantee, to unlock the Fifth Amendment protection was to guarantee he would not be prosecuted,” he said. He said that when he had said he was still open to prosecuting Cosby, he meant that prosecutors might be able to find evidence in the testimony about Cosby’s encounters with other women, not Constand.In its recent ruling, the Supreme Court agreed that Castor’s descriptions of the promise were “inconsistent and equivocal,” but it held that he had been the district attorney, a powerful position, and that Cosby had a right to rely on his assurances. It emphasized the fact that, although there had been no formal agreement, Cosby had agreed to sit for four days of deposition in the Constand civil suit, a decision the justices viewed as evidence that a promise must have existed. By their reasoning, Castor’s successors were breaking that promise, however informal, and undermining his due process rights by using his deposition against Cosby.“The law is clear that, based upon their unique role in the criminal justice system, prosecutors generally are bound by their assurances, particularly when defendants rely to their detriment upon those guarantees,” the court’s majority opinion said.In particular, the Supreme Court parsed the language of the 2005 news release in which Castor announced his decision not to prosecute Cosby. It read, in part: “The District Attorney does not intend to expound publicly on the details of his decision for fear that his opinions and analysis might be given undue weight by jurors in any contemplated civil action. District Attorney Castor cautions all parties to this matter that he will reconsider this decision should the need arise.”The trial court had read Castor’s statement as an acknowledgment that, rather than agreeing to never prosecute Cosby, Castor had retained the option of revisiting the case. That interpretation was in line with what Castor told the Philadelphia Inquirer about the news release in 2015. “I put in there that if any evidence surfaced that was admissible then I would revisit the issue,” he said.The Supreme Court, however, held that Castor was only holding open the possibility that he might again publicly discuss the case.Some legal analysts had thought Cosby stood a chance of overturning his conviction on different grounds. The trial court had allowed prosecutors to bring in five other women, who were not part of the case, to testify that they too had been drugged and assaulted by Cosby. Cosby’s lawyers had argued that a jury would have a difficult time looking past the testimony of the women in deciding what had happened with Constand.To the surprise of many lawyers watching the case, the Supreme Court said it did not need to address that issue because it was moot once the jurists had decided the prosecution should not have happened because of the promise.“The very premise that somehow this promise was made, it’s not in writing and this very rich, well-lawyered person relied upon it and it’s therefore enforceable, is crazy,” said Nancy Erika Smith, a civil rights lawyer in New Jersey. “The trial court saw Bruce Castor testify and found Bruce Castor not credible, usually that’s the end of the story.”The Supreme Court majority argued in its decision that it had not, in fact, gone beyond its role, and had not revisited facts already decided by the trial court. It pointed out that it had joined the trial court in finding that there had been no formal agreement. Two of the justices said Castor’s explanations for his actions were “odd and ever-shifting.”John F.X. Reilly, a former deputy district attorney in Pennsylvania’s Delaware County, said he was not persuaded.“The majority acknowledged but overlooked a fundamental principle of appellate review,” he said, “deference to a trial court’s factual findings that are supported by the record.”In reversing Cosby’s conviction, the Supreme Court ruled additionally that he could not be tried again on the Constand charges. Judge Baer, on television, said, unpopular or not, the decision was meant to prevent government overreach.“Nobody is sympathetic to Bill Cosby,” he said. “That’s to protect 13 million Pennsylvanians against that kind of conduct.”Prosecutors said they were examining the possibility of appeal. More

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      ‘Overwhelmed and Devastated’: Cosby’s Accusers on Decision to Free Him

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      Many of the women who accused Bill Cosby of sexual misconduct, and worse, said they were disheartened by the ruling of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.Even before the #MeToo movement transformed the way the country, and the world, viewed sexual misconduct and empowered scores of women to speak out, dozens had already come forward with accusations against Bill Cosby.They were of all ages and from all walks of life — aspiring actors, models and, in one important case, a Temple University employee. Some were young adults. Others were older women with accounts of abuse that stretched back decades.But they all cheered when Mr. Cosby was found guilty in 2018 of assaulting a woman years earlier, hailing the decision as long-awaited vindication and evidence that famous and influential men could be held accountable.That sense of relief and justice came crashing down Wednesday as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction.Andrea Constand, who brought the charges against Mr. Cosby that had led to his conviction, called the ruling “disappointing” and said she worried it could discourage other women from pursuing prosecutions in cases of sexual assault.“We urge all victims,” Ms. Constand said in a statement made jointly with her lawyers, “to have their voices heard.”Patricia Steuer, 65, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said that she had been preparing herself for the possibility that Mr. Cosby’s conviction would be overturned but was still “a little stunned” by the court’s ruling.“I’m feeling sad because this is absolutely a perceived loss on my part,” Ms. Steuer said. “I’m wondering what the 43-year ordeal that I went through was supposed to be about.”But she also said she was “consoled by the fact that I believe we did the only thing that we could, which is to come forward and tell the truth.”Gloria Allred, a lawyer who represented a number of women who accused Mr. Cosby of abuse, with several of them at a news conference in 2015.Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images North AmericaWith the ruling, Mr. Cosby “may claim that he’s been vindicated or persecuted or that he’s innocent, but I know that’s not true, and the other women who came forward also know that that’s not true,” Ms. Steuer said.Victoria Valentino, another of Mr. Cosby’s accusers, told ABC News that “my stomach is lurching” and that she was “deeply distressed” by what she said was “the injustice of the whole thing.”In a brief telephone interview on Wednesday, she said only that she was “overwhelmed and devastated.”Ms. Steuer worried about what the ruling meant for the #MeToo movement. “This is going to have ramifications for any woman who has ever come forward about a man who did this to them or any person who is thinking about coming forward,” she said.Eden Tirl, another of Mr. Cosby’s accusers, told Kate Snow of NBC News that the resolution of the case must now also become part of the story of the #MeToo movement and its narrative.“From the very beginning, the rigid constructs of the statute of limitations did not provide protection or a pathway for justice for the women that came out against Cosby,” she wrote to Ms. Snow via text message. “The outdated laws are so clearly in place, protecting men in these cases, more often than not.”“I am completely out of breath,” she added.In a statement, the National Organization for Women denounced Mr. Cosby’s release, saying that “the judicial system in America” had “failed survivors again.”Tina Tchen, the head of Time’s Up, the advocacy organization founded by powerful women in Hollywood, called the court decision “devastating,” but promised that the bravery and resolve showed by the women who spoke out about Mr. Cosby would not be “in vain.”And in her own statement, Gloria Allred, the lawyer for dozens of Mr. Cosby’s accusers, said her heart went out to “those who bravely testified in both of his criminal cases.”“Despite the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision, this was an important fight for justice and even though the court overturned the conviction on technical grounds, it did not vindicate Bill Cosby’s conduct and should not be interpreted as a statement or a finding that he did not engage in the acts of which he has been accused,” Ms. Allred said. More

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      Agreement with Bruce Castor, Trump Attorney, Is At the Heart of Bill Cosby's Release

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      The Pennsylvania Supreme Court freed the actor Bill Cosby from prison based largely on a past agreement with a former Pennsylvania prosecutor best known for defending President Donald J. Trump during his February impeachment trial. In a 79-page opinion, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote that a “non-prosecution agreement” that had been struck with Bruce L. Castor Jr. meant that Bill Cosby should not have been charged in the case for which he was convicted and sentenced in 2018. The court also barred a retrial.The agreement came about when, in 2005, Mr. Cosby was investigated in the case of Andrea Constand, and Mr. Castor, a former district attorney of Montgomery County, gave Mr. Cosby his assurance that he would not be charged in the case.Mr. Castor testified that while there was insufficient evidence to bring a criminal prosecution, he had given Mr. Cosby the assurance to encourage him to testify in a subsequent civil case brought by Ms. Constand.In that testimony, Mr. Cosby acknowledged giving quaaludes to women he was pursuing for sex — evidence that played a key part in his trial after Mr. Castor’s successors reopened the case and charged Mr. Cosby in December 2015.“In light of these circumstances, the subsequent decision by successor D. A.s to prosecute Cosby violated Cosby’s due process rights,” the appeals ruling said. More

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      Bill Cosby Case: Judges Review Decision to Allow Multiple Accusers

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusClassic Holiday MoviesHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBill Cosby Case: Judges Review Decision to Allow Multiple AccusersSeveral Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices hearing Cosby’s appeal of his sexual assault conviction expressed concern that five additional women had been allowed to testify at his 2018 trial.Bill Cosby entering court during his 2018 trial on sexual assault charges. An appeal of his conviction in that case was heard Tuesday by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.Credit…Matt Slocum/Associated PressBy More