If I may, justice is about more than punishment for the perpetrator.
In this case, justice also means that the victims can rest assured that they have been heard, that they matter, that they did not suffer for nothing.
It means that women throughout society can have faith that the law will protect them against even powerful people who would rob them of their dignity and more.
I realize that this is a high bar to set for justice. I also realize that nothing the court could have done in this case would have fully accomplished that justice.
Justice, even imperfect justice, will be the cumulative result of a lot of cases. Our society is still a long way from even imperfect justice as we stand, and this was a further step backward.
Cosby spent almost three years in prison. Traditionally he would have faced no consequences at all. It was two steps forward, one back, as is how progress usually happen.
Perhaps. Three years of time served is better than nothing, to be sure.
But like I said, there’s more to it than time served.
You have talked about the deterrent effect in past posts, but that goes both ways. If you were raped, would you take the risk of reporting it to the authorities at all, knowing what you now know? The message it sends is more important than the punishment dealt out (or not).
And yes, I get it, the court was still bound by the law and had to make that decision. So what then?
The message is that Cosby got convicted and got out years later on a technicality. Why should that stop anyone from going to authorities? Even without the civil settlements, that has to count as a win for the victims. The court did believe he was guilty. It’s cases where the police and prosecutors ignore the woman, claim she has made up the story, that deters people from reporting.
Then there is public press and smearing campaigns that unfortunately tends to happen in celebrity cases, and can make women keep quiet, but you can’t blame the legal system for that.
So we should be happy that we got something, anything?
What conclusions are you drawing from all of this? That this time we got 3 years and maybe next time we’ll get 10 years if the prosecution does things by the books? That things could have gone much worse? That, technicality or no, at least we all know that he is guilty? These are all points that can very well be made, but you seem to be implying them rather than outright saying them.
If you just want to say that prosecutors have to follow the rules, and this is what happens when they don’t, then you are not telling us something that we don’t already know. In fact, somebody else beat you to it in this very thread.
So let’s not belabor the point. It’s a shitty situation all around.
No kidding. Cosby’s not even the victim of prosecutorial incompetence. Cosby benefitted from prosecutorial incompetence. We all saw Bruce Castor at Trump’s second impeachment. Castor is utterly incompetent. Cosby had the good fortune of getting for a prosecutor an idiot whose only through-line to their public career is a staunch belief that you can’t convict rich people. So Castor goes to one of the most prolific violent criminals known to America and says, “Look, I’ll let you off the hook.”
The Supreme Court didn’t protect Cosby from prosecutorial misconduct, they upheld prosecutorial misconduct in Cosby’s favour.
That’s all assuming that I agree, for argument’s sake, with the court’s decision.
And I don’t. Facts of cases matter. There is a difference between prosecuting someone who admits to rape under a verbal non-prosecution agreement and prosecuting someone who is given such an agreement on a lesser charge and under more reasonable circumstances. A common phrase is “Bad facts make bad law” meaning that when the facts of a case are very egregious, judges tend to bend their interpretation of the law because they can’t stomach the unjust outcome that would result from a straightforward application. But not these judges, not this time. These judges had no problem stomaching letting Cosby free, and even wrote about how wronged Cosby was in their decision.
America, if this is somehow protecting your civil rights so you can stay out of prison why does your country, with such great civil rights protections, have the highest incarceration rate in the world? Your civil rights are not being protected, whatever you’ve been doing to protect them hasn’t been working. America is the free-est country in the world for white supremacist domestic terrorists, and it’s the free-est country in the world for wealthy rapists, but, if you simply count the number of Americans who have had their freedoms taken away, it’s the least free country in the world overall.
So keep on protecting the right of your most prolific rapists to cut plainly unjust deals with incompetent prosecutors who exist only to protect the wealthy, America. I’m sure that’ll trickle down to the everyman one of these days.
The message is that Cosby got convicted and got out years later on a technicality. Not my fault if you can’t read it. Can you explain why women shouldn’t report to authorities because of this sentenc,e which is what you seemed to imply with your earlier question?
In most copuntries three years in prison is considered a significant punishment, you make it sound like it’s a slap on the wrist. What would have been necessary to satisfy you?
The conclusion is that while not too long ago Cosby would never have been prosecuted in the first place, now he gets a significant prison time…That’s progress.
Whether something is a slap on the wrist depends a lot on the crime, and this should be a pretty major one in most countries (maybe not copuntries, I don’t know many quite as cop-oriented as America). You need look no further for the message this sent here than the reaction from Cosby himself, who is planning a comeback tour now that his sentence has been thrown out, apparently with the idea that he has been vindicated.
You honestly think that doesn’t say something to people about how likely it is that their reports of being raped will be taken seriously, that in the case where finally, finally this notorious serial rapist faced some consequences, it is treated as a mistake and he’s back in business? Sorry, I don’t believe that for a second. Stop being disingenuous. While you wax about minimal progress, people are getting hurt here.
People are going to misinterpret messaging online. It’s your responsibility to either accept that or ensure your point is understood. Respect the reality that text is a poor medium for nuance.
Compared to the decades he should’ve gotten for, you know, drugging and raping scores of women?
Your blithe disregard for the trauma inflicted upon scores of women is appalling. (And please, don’t come back at me with nitpicking about him not specifically serving a sentence for all of those crimes, etc etc).
Also, there are lots of people serving life for less destructive crimes like theft and plenty of people serving decades for the “crime” of smoking a little pot. Cosby caused real, deep, traumatic harm to actual people. They just got a slap in the face over this, thanks to this bullshit.
If we go for how the system ought to work, I think he should have gotten his three years in prison back in 1965 when supposedly the first case happened, and then it’s likely the other cases wouldn’t have happened. That’s the real problem, him getting away with it for so long, not that there wasn’t a hard enough punishment decades later when justice caught up with him to at least some extent.
That’s like saying the real problem with Rome was when the Goths beat the army, not when they sacked the capitol 32 years later. There’s no dichotomy, they can both be problems. In fact they are almost certain to be because they are the same problem.
Cosby got away with this so long because people didn’t take rape seriously, and he has gotten away with it now because people don’t take rape seriously. I’m sorry this doesn’t fit with the progress you want to paint this as but, well, sometimes reality sucks. You might notice all of the women here picked up on that, somehow.
Indeed. Cosby’s victims and the victims of prosecutorial incompetence are one in the same. The prosecutors fucked up and the women whom Cosby has raped got punished for it.
Did I say that? Can you show me what I said that was construed that way? I will say this though: 3 years is significantly less than 10. But, as I also said, it is better than nothing.
