Sexual assault case against Bill Cosby to proceed

Cosby, 78, was arrested in December and charged with drugging and violating former Temple University athletic department employee Andrea Constand at his Philadelphia home in 2004.

Attorneys for Cosby spent the last two days arguing that former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor made an oral agreement with Cosby’s lawyer over 10 years ago.

Embattled comedian Bill Cosby was back in a Philadelphia court this week over sexual assault charges.

Bill Cosby To Face Charges Bill Cosby leaves the Montgomery County courthouse after his bid to have his charges dismissed is denied.

As the case against Cosby moves forward, he will either risk going to trial or will have to take a plea deal.

Troiani said Cosby’s attorneys wanted Constand to agree to “never cooperate in a criminal investigation” against him.

The case was reopened a year ago based on Cosby’s newly released deposition in the accuser’s lawsuit and similar accusations raised by dozens of other women.

On cross examination, District Attorney Kevin Steele attacked the idea that Cosby’s lawyers would allow a deal that was never spelled out in a formal non-prosecution agreement.

Cosby’s lawyers said they never would have let him testify if they didn’t believe criminal charges were off the table.

He said that declining to prosecute Cosby set the stage for a civil deposition in which the entertainer admitted to giving Constand the anti-allergy drug Benadryl before a sexual encounter he described as consensual.

“Cosby would’ve had to have been nuts to say those things if there was any chance he could’ve been prosecuted”, Castor said, referring to the damaging testimony unsealed last summer.

Cosby and Constand settled in civil court in 2006 and, as Cosby’s lawyers tell it, Castor assured Cosby that he would not be prosecuted in the Constand case.

As the criminal justice system creaked closer to a sexual-assault trial for Bill Cosby, legal analysts are already speculating about potential legal obstacles for both the prosecution and Cosby’s defense team. He said at the time he had affairs with young women.

But Castor’s promise, whether or not he made one, did not stand and a county judge dismissed a defense motion to dismiss the charges against Cosby.

“A promise of a prosecutor, even an oral promise, is one that is absolute, 100 percent enforceable”, argued Cosby lawyer Christopher Tayback. Prosecutors on Wednesday are expected to begin making their case that there was no binding agreement not to bring charges.

More than 50 women have publicly alleged sexual abuse by Cosby, who attained his greatest fame for his role as a lovable obstetrician and family man in the hit 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show.