June 23, 2020
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to review two key points in Bill Cosby's appeal for his 2018 sexual assault conviction.
The state's highest court will review Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Steven O'Niell's decision that allowed prosecutors to call five witnesses to testify on Cosby's prior alleged assaults and introduce evidence that Cosby had previously given women quaaludes, the Associate Press reported.
Heidi Thomas, Janice Baker-Kinney, Chelan Lasha, Janice Dickinson and Lise Lotte-Lublin all testified that Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them in a controlled environment. However, Cosby's lawyers argue that the witness statements were outdated and not relevant to the charges.
Additionally, the court will examine Cosby's agreement with a former prosecutor that said he would not be charged for assaulting Andrea Constand. Cosby depended on this agreement when he testified at Constand's civil lawsuit in 2015.
“As we have all stated, the false conviction of Bill Cosby is so much bigger than him — it’s about the destruction of ALL Black people and people of color in America,” Spokesman Andrew Wyatt said in a statement Tuesday.
Cosby, 82, has served less than two years of a three to 10-year sentence in a Montgomery County prison for drugging and molesting Constand, the former director of operations for the Temple University women's basketball team, in 2004. He also was sentenced to attend mandatory lifetime counseling and register in the Pennsylvania sex offender database. He filed an appeal with the Superior Court last year, but the panel of judges denied his request and upheld his conviction in December.
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