And what punishment, pray tell, would you regard as just?
Don’t confuse a lack of sympathy for a wealthy serial rapist for endorsement of the brutal American prison-industrial complex.
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I understand why a no prosecution deal would lead to this result. I can almost understand why a prosecutor might make a deal like that to get Cosby to testify and get him to admit in open court that he is a rapist rather than try a difficult prosecution in a he said/she said case. But is there any kind of evidence that this deal actually happened? Were Cosby’s lawyers SO incompetent that they didn’t “get it in writing”? It seems that everybody is arguing about whether such a deal was a good idea, when we should be discussing whether such a deal actually exists. I mean can Cosby reasonably have relied upon some sort of unwritten pinkie-swear from a prosecutor, if that is indeed what happened?
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I can readily believe Bruce Castor, Trump lawyer unextraordinaire, cut a verbal deal. DAs are often reluctant to prosecute cases they don’t think are slam-dunks, because the culture of state and federal prosecutors is far more about winning than justice. Part of the problem is that prosecutorial discretion lets prosecutors make these decisions without any meaningful public oversight or input from victims. That’s one of the avenues for the miscarriage of justice in dire need of reform.
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Oh, great; another contentious Cosby thread…
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I’m baffled that there could be such a thing as a “verbal deal” between the lawyers of the prosecution and the lawyers of the defense that holds any weight in a court of law. In my [admittedly sparse, and not involving criminal cases] experience, every legal agreement requires multiple signed, dated, and notarized documents in triplicate before they are real.
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If it ever comes out that Bob Newhart is a serial killer, I DO NOT want to hear about it.
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I don’t see you giving an answer to that questiong either. I only stated that “letting him off the hook” wasn’t exactly true. His sentence was three to ten years in state prison, and he served almost three.
It’s not up to me; nor should it be.
Fair enough. I could have been more exact in my language. My points stand.
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And the women he raped have to serve life with their trauma…
but hey, a rich asshole got off, so justice served, right? /s
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No, that was Merv Griffin
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Yet you seem to be convinced the judge made the wrong decision…
Both the DA and Cosby testify to it in other testimony and the exact extent of it was argued in pretrial filings. It is bad deal and someone should be digging through Castor’s bank statements for unexplained payments, but its existence seems established.
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I do?
Oh, I see, you’re conflating my conviction that this outcome was a wrong with a conviction that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (which has seven judges, BTW) made the wrong decision.
You see, I’m not a legal scholar and, probably like yourself, wholly unqualified to determine whether they made the wrong legal decision.
What I’m absolutely qualified, as a human being, to do is determine that this entire process amounts to a miscarriage of justice, a fundamentally immoral outcome, a slap in the face to all the women Cosby raped.
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You’d be surprised how people will bend the rules just to maintain the status quo, so maybe not.
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Out on a technicality does not equal innocence. I wish he’d quit acting like he’s exonerated.
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I expect that from him. I wish others here would quit acting like he’s exonerated, or claiming that the real crime we should focus on is the prosecutorial misconduct and incompetence that makes him as much a victim in this matter as all the women he raped.
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He’s never even acted like he was guilty to begin with, so how would he believe he’s been exonerated? Let’s be clear, in his mind, he isn’t guilty, because he did nothing wrong. (In his mind).
Legally, he’s innocent. The conviction’s tossed and double jeopardy attaches, not only to this, but to the five other women who testified against him too and their cases.
It’s threads like this that make this one of the few places I actually read the comments.
Not only can we walk and chew bubblegum, but we reasonably expect that everyone else can, too.
Then we are back to what you would consider a just punishment. Not a legally correct one, a just punishment. You expected me to have an answer, yet can provide none yourself.
Expected, no. Whether you answered my question was entirely up to you. Replying to my question by not answering it but asking it of me is, politely put, deflection.
I don’t consider myself qualified to deem a particular length of punishment just. I want sentences for rightful convictions not to be cut short because the defendant cut a ridiculous deal with an incompetent venal prosecutor absent any meaningful oversight and had the money to pursue it. Do you? And that means reforming prosecutorial discretion and the unequal leverage of wealth in the American justice system.
But as soon as anyone brings up those problems and how they led to this miscarriage of justice, folks come out of the woodwork to argue that the Pennsylvanian Supreme Court made the legally correct decision (which they may well have because, again, I’m not a legal scholar and would surprised if you are), even in a discussion about a comic that is about the former and not the latter. Because they’re evidently either unable or unwilling to acknowledge that different people who find this outcome unjust do so for different reasons. And I can’t help them with that. 
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