While many on social media and elsewhere express outrage over the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacating Bill Cosby’s 2018 sexual assault conviction because of a “technicality,” the chief justice laid the blame at the feet of the prosecutors, excoriating their actions as “reprehensible.”
Chief Justice Max Baer particularly blasted Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele for going back on an agreement Cosby struck with former prosecutor Bruce Castor that a deposition the famed comedian gave in a civil case couldn’t be used in a criminal trial.
“[Steele] didn’t just break the deal, he broke the rules,” Chief Justice Max Baer told Philadelphia’s local ABC News affiliate. “What we said is we’re not gonna let the commonwealth, the state through the district attorneys, to engage in that kind of reprehensible bait-and-switch.”
He emphasized that the court’s decision wasn’t to protect Cosby but “13 million Pennsylvanians against that kind of conduct.”
Baer concluded that it wasn’t the Supreme Court’s duty to find guilt or innocence on the part of Cosby. However, what the court did find was an illegal prosecution on the part of Steele.
“What we found was what the state did was inappropriate,” he said.
Cosby won his freedom on June 29 after spending nearly three years in prison on a 2018 conviction of indecent aggravated assault.
The comedian and his team have since argued with those who have called the decision by the Supreme Court to overturn his conviction a technicality.
“You’re sitting in a room trying to explain something, and there is a knock on the door. You say, ‘who is it?’ ‘It is the truth.’ So people start jumping out of the window,” Cosby told the Black Press in his only extensive interview since his release.
“The court’s decision was not a technicality,” Cosby said. “These people sound like they haven’t read what the judges have written. It’s not a technicality. These [detractors] don’t want to know anything. It’s like the woman who said she knows five women that I drugged and raped. Well, where are they?”
Despite former prosecutor Castor providing written affidavits directly to Steele and offering his testimony in pretrial hearings, Steele incredulously claimed he didn’t know a previous deal existed between the state and Cosby.
“To be very clear, prosecutors, in this case, did not believe there was an agreement not to prosecute or immunity for the defendant at the time we moved forward on the case, and we do not believe it now,” Steele told ABC News. “If we had believed there was an agreement or immunity, we would not have moved forward in our attempt to bring Cosby to justice.”
Castor has told the Black Press that Cosby should never have been prosecuted because of the deal made in 2005.
Meanwhile, Cosby has already begun plans to resume his stand-up career. He plans to appear at an autism event in August to entertain those supporting that cause.
The “I Spy” legend is also taking part in a documentary about his life and trials produced by Michelle Major, a former producer for ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“There’s a big smile on my face,” Cosby insisted. “A big smile on my face because I was there. I know what happened, and I’m watching and hearing these fascists and Nazis, and I watched them really come out of the woodworks as termites. The infestation of when [former President] Donald Trump came through, and they just let it all hang out. That’s who they are. That’s who their ancestors are.
“They want their ancestors to be people who came here for religious freedoms after being persecuted — but by whom? Things weren’t right in dear old England,” Cosby said. “They got on these ships, but you were criminals, and people signed on to look after wealthy people’s findings. Christopher Columbus got as lost as a white man can get, but got off the boat, took a flag, and said he would name this and so forth and so on.”
