Cosby due in court as lawyers push to get charges dropped

A Montgomery County, Pennsylvania judge will decide Tuesday if sexual assault charges against Bill Cosby should be dismissed.

Tuesday’s court proceeding will again bring together Castor and Steele, political rivals who faced each other in the race for district attorney in November.

She also said that if a non-prosecution agreement really existed, Cosby could have sought a formal order of immunity from the judge overseeing the civil case. Neither side can definitively prove there was an agreement.

Former District Attorney Bruce Castor is expected to testify for the defense that he made the deal to persuade Cosby to testify in the accuser’s 2005 civil lawsuit, according to The Associated Press. In lieu of the dozens of similar accusations, Steele chose to file charges against Cosby in December, one month before the 12-year statute of limitations expired. Cosby was both a sounding board and someone who could open doors for a woman considering a career change. That’s because Cosby’s long-time attorney Walter M. Phillips, Jr. died in 2015. In fact, the only thing the defense or Castor have pointed to was a 2005 press release that expressly reserved the possibility of future prosecution.

“Cosby could move to have the deposition testimony kept out of his criminal trial, under the theory that the prosecution only got that testimony because of its promise to Cosby”, Wooldridge said.

Cosby admitted in the deposition that he had a series of affairs with young models and actresses; had obtained quaaludes to give women before sex; and gave accuser Andrea Constand three pills before a January 2004 encounter at his home.

“Mr. Cosby is prepared to offer Mr. Castor’s testimony at an evidentiary hearing on this petition”, McMonagle wrote in court papers, all but ensuring that Castor will be called to testify on Tuesday.

During the hearing, which could include testimony, Cosby’s attorneys plan to argue to Administrative Judge Steven O’Neill that the district attorney at the time, Bruce Castor, promised Cosby he would never be prosecuted on deposition testimony from a civil case filed by Constand in 2005. She spoke frequently about it to Cosby, during phone calls, at social events and during the approximately half-dozen visits she made to his Cheltenham home.

The Cosby case was a major point of contention in the race, which Castor has called “the dirtiest row office election ever in our county”. The Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, then led by a different prosecutor, reopened the investigation based on “new evidence” from that now public deposition.

Harrisburg attorney Corky Goldstein has been following the case and says the alleged deal raises some questions.

Ferman, according to court papers, replied to Castor’s email on September 25, stating in a hand-delivered letter, “The first I heard of such a binding agreement was your email”.

Comedian Bill Cosby allegedly acknowledged that he had intimate relations with and gave drugs to one of the women accusing him of sexually assaulting her in 2004.

Steele argued in a motion that it was not in Castor’s power to “essentially grant immunity via a press release by agreeing not to prosecute”, because Pennsylvania law reserves the power to grant immunity exclusively to judges.