Bill Cosby seeks to get his sex-assault case tossed for prosecutorial wrongdoing
More than two months before Bill Cosby's retrial on sexual-assault charges, lawyers are revving up with a flurry of legal papers in a Pennsylvania court: Cosby's defense wants to get the case tossed, citing prosecutorial misconduct, while the district attorney wants to expand the number of his accusers who are allowed to testify.
This time, when Cosby's retrial on three charges of aggravated indecent assault opens on April 2, the stakes will be even higher for both sides, after their failure last summer to persuade a jury he was either guilty or innocent.
After an 11-day trial and five days of deliberations in June, the jury deadlocked and Judge Steven O'Neill declared a mistrial.
Now both sides are getting ready to go at it again in Norristown, Pa., outside Philadelphia, with District Attorney Kevin Steele back at the head of the prosecution team.
Cosby has a new set of defense lawyers headed by Thomas Mesereau, the flamboyant mop-haired attorney who has defended accused celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Robert Blake and Marion "Suge" Knight.
Cosby, 80, was charged in late 2015 with drugging and molesting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand, 44, during an encounter at his home in Montgomery County, Pa., in 2004. Cosby maintains they were friends and lovers and their encounter was consensual.
In recent weeks, both teams have been busy. On Friday, Cosby filed a motion to dismiss the case, accusing prosecutors of withholding and destroying evidence that could have helped him at trial.
Cosby's previous defense team filed multiple motions to dismiss starting in 2016. The defense lost every time.
His latest attempt to get the case dismissed is based on an issue that came up during the trial. Cosby's lawyers say prosecutors only recently informed them of their interview last year with a woman who cast doubt on Constand's allegations. They also say detectives destroyed notes from the interview.
The woman, Marguerite Jackson, says Constand told her of a plan to falsely accuse a "high-profile person" so she could sue and get money. The two were friends and co-workers, Cosby's motion asserts, but Constand denied on the stand that she knew Jackson. Cosby asserts the prosecution thus allowed Constand to "testify falsely" during the first trial.
But Judge O'Neill blocked Jackson's testimony when Cosby's lawyers sought to question her about about Constand at the first trial. Constand's lawyer has maintained that Jackson is lying.
"In this case, the only appropriate remedy for the prosecution's egregious misconduct is dismissal," Cosby's motion says.
Meanwhile, Steele last week sought to revisit another issue he tried to introduce at the first trial: Testimony by more of the five dozen women who have come forward since October 2014 to publicly accuse Cosby of drugging and/or raping them in encounters dating back to the mid-1960s.
Steele wants to call 19 other accusers to show a pattern of "prior bad acts" by Cosby against other women, under the theory that if jurors hear the stories of what Cosby allegedly did to other accusers, they might be more inclined to see a pattern that bolsters Constand's allegations.
Steele tried to call 13 other accusers to testify at the first trial, but Judge O'Neill allowed only one of them. Steele wants O'Neill to reconsider, arguing that the other accusations show that Cosby's alleged prior acts are sufficiently "distinctive and so nearly identical as to become the signature of the same perpetrator."
At the first trial, Cosby's lawyers objected to any testimony by other accusers, arguing that some encounters were consensual and other allegations too vague — some of the accusers were unsure when the alleged encounters took place — for Cosby to adequately defend himself.
Among new potential witnesses: Former model Janice Dickinson, who claims Cosby drugged and raped her in Lake Tahoe, Calif, in 1982, and is suing him in civil court in California for defamation.
Contributing: The Associated Press