Thoughts on the Cosby Conviction

April 26th, 2018

Wonder What Ward Cleaver was Hiding

The world has gone completely nuts. Bruce Jenner is a woman, and Bill Cosby is a convicted rapist.

He was not convicted of “rape.” The language of the law is not the same as the language of everyday life. Cosby was convicted of “indecent aggravated assault.” According to the relevant Pennsylvania statute, this means he penetrated someone who didn’t consent or who didn’t have the ability to consent (unconscious, underage, etcetera).

It appears Pennsylvania doesn’t have a statutory crime called “rape,” and that “indecent aggravated assault” is the term they use. I’m not a criminal lawyer, so I don’t know all that much about criminal offense nomenclature. I know someone who is accused of raping a child, and the charge in his case is “lewd and lascivious molestation.” I don’t know if any jurisdiction has a crime called “rape.”

Anyway, “rapist” is the correct term, based on the Pennsylvania statute. Penetration without consent is rape.

Journalists all over the US are now relieved that they don’t have to type the word “alleged” over and over when discussing Cosby. They can just say “rape,” “raped,” and “rapist.” Cosby can’t sue them for defamation. Not that he would. He didn’t sue obscure comedian Hannibal Buress when he started the snowball rolling by saying Cosby was a rapist.

Remember that? It’s interesting to consider it, because it reveals the true cause of the Cosby prosecutions. Rape wasn’t the problem. He had gotten away with rape, and he was enjoying a peaceful old age, to be followed by a quiet death and a huge public funeral full of weeping and praise. The problem was that Bill Cosby criticized young black people for behaving badly. He said young black men needed to pull their pants up. That’s what set Buress off, and Buress got people Googling. Then the public turned on Cosby, and up popped Gloria Allred and the rest.

Here’s what Buress said:

“Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.”

Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches.

Oddly, Cosby’s problems weren’t the start of the #MeToo movement. Buress called him out in 2014, and #MeToo started in 2017, with Harvey Weinstein. Somehow a billionaire or near-billionaire entertainer got called out for something many, many people in his business were doing, and everyone else kept on groping and molesting. There was no groundswell of accusation or repentance.

If Bill Cosby had joined Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and if he had spent his weekends raging at white people through a bullhorn, would he be a convicted felon right now? No. I’m sure of it. People knew he abused women, and they weren’t upset enough to do anything about it. Almost no one cared until he ran off from the victimhood-establishment plantation.

Cosby was safe until he turned on people who assumed that, as a black man, he was a true victimhood believer. He broke with the left on an issue, so he got pummeled. That’s normal. Somehow Weinstein got nailed while he was still out there bloviating about gun control and every other ill-conceived leftist notion imaginable. That’s not as normal. And Weinstein was even more powerful than Cosby, so you would think he would be harder to take down.

Maybe the attacks on Cosby softened the targets that succeeded him.

I had no idea Cosby had done bad things when I heard about Hannibal Buress. I didn’t know Andrea Constand had sued him in 2005, even though the news had been on the web. The big-time press must have ignored it, just as they’ve ignored Al Sharpton’s defamation, his incitement of rioting, his refusal to pay his just debts, and his tax evasion.

Buress isn’t happy that he became the face of the Cosby posse. I don’t know what he expected, since he made the accusations in more than one appearance. I suppose he must have had some very lonely times since the avalanche started. A lot of black people will support any successful black person who is accused of a crime, and they will not be kind to whistleblowers. I know a lot of black people, and they tend to defend such individuals and try to prove white criminals get much better treatment.

Some black people complain because Dylann Roof was arrested peacefully while a number of black criminals have been killed during apprehension. They fail to take note of the fact that Roof surrendered without any resistance. That makes a difference.

It doesn’t ALWAYS make a difference. A very violent black criminal named Markeith Loyd was arrested while crawling to the cops on his belly, and one kicked him in the face and crushed his eye. A chopper was shooting video, and the camera operator zoomed way out and moved off of Loyd as soon as the beating started.

Anyway, there have probably been a lot of parties Buress wasn’t invited to.

It’s very sad to see someone Cosby’s age, who was formerly respected and admired, go out like this. He’s going to appeal, but he’ll probably lose, and he is still open to all sorts of civil litigation. His status as a proven rapist will make those cases easier to lose.

Remember how we used to see him? I didn’t enjoy his show because when I watched it, I felt I was being beaten with a PC strap (“Black people can be rich and intelligent! Moms are smarter than dads! Kids are smarter than dads! New York is a great place to live! New Yorkers know more than everyone else!”), but generally, Americans loved him and thought highly of him. In retrospect, he looks very different, and it’s disturbing that he chose to play a gynecologist.

It’s amazing how short-sighted and evil we can be when the Holy Spirit isn’t guiding us. Cosby is an intelligent, talented man, yet he established a lifelong pattern of a type of abuse which is not only cruel and prurient, but cowardly. It is extremely disgraceful. He was also extremely reckless. You can’t do what he did, over and over, and not expect repercussions. I can’t believe he made his bad decisions on his own. He has to have spirits egging him on. No functional human being is that crazy without help.

I’ve done things I can barely believe I did. I know what it’s like to do something so stupid you look back on it and can’t understand what was going through your own mind.

Weinstein is probably next. He has a trail of accusers, and the cops are actively preparing at least one case.

8 Responses to “Thoughts on the Cosby Conviction”

  1. Rick C Says:

    “He’s going to appeal, but he’ll probably lose”

    I’ve seen some people saying there was some weird stuff going on in his second trial, like unsealing his testimony from the 2005 case, and the court allowing other women to testify. Apparently that’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen on a retrial.

    Do you have any thoughts about that and whether that could cause an appeal court to overturn the verdict?

  2. Steve H. Says:

    To answer that question, I would have to be familiar with all the evidence and the complete trial record, and I would have to be an attorney with a lot of experience in criminal appeals. I still wouldn’t be able to promise anything, because courts are capricious and inept.

    I think he’ll lose simply because most criminal appeals don’t go anywhere. Maybe he’ll win, though. The judge may have done something very stupid.

    I noticed something interesting. Cosby’s lawyer ALLEGEDLY (!) slept in the courtroom during the trial. That would be an incredible breach of ethics. I wonder if an appellate lawyer will try to make something out of that. You could say Cosby didn’t get the jury he needed because of ineffective assistance from counsel.

    The judge was reading Cosby’s old testimony to the jury at the time. Perhaps if Mesereau had been awake, he might have been able to object to something particularly damaging.

    A really unethical lawyer could sleep in court deliberately, to set his client up for an appeal. It wouldn’t look good to future clients or his bar association, however.

    An assistant state’s attorney once told me the PD’s in Miami used to set themselves up for ineffective assistance of counsel claims, as insurance for their clients. Can’t say whether it was true. Lawyers have been known to do it, as a quick Google will show.

    I was an intern with the PD for a while, and I was very unfavorably impressed with the ethics of one of the attorneys.

    I wish someone would pay me four figures per hour to sleep.

    http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/sustained-objections-6345414

  3. baldilocks Says:

    In a way, people like Cosby and Weinstein are blessed. They have the opportunity to repent to the Lord. Not that it’s likely, but one never know what God is up to.

    But now that they have been confronted here on earth with their crimes, I don’t even want to imagine what will happen to them if they don’t repent.

    Side note: two of Cosby’s children have died. A lot people get mad when I say that this is, sometimes, a curse and/or a warning to the parents, but I do think that this so in his and his wife’s case. Mrs. Cosby certainly enabled or ignored her husband’s sins.

  4. Steve H. Says:

    My family killed a lot of people by growing cigarette tobacco, and my aunt, uncle, and mother died from cancer. My sister got lung cancer, too, although she lived.

    Cosby made a lot of women feel worthless and powerless. There has to be some kind of earthly price for that.

  5. baldilocks Says:

    I have paid earthly prices for some of of mine — uncannily identical to the sins I committed. I’ve thanked God for letting me see that this was so and that I don’t have to pay the ultimate price.

    Makes me think of death-row or life-in-prison converts to Christ. This is how to know if they are truly converted: when they are not trying to get out of their earthly sentence. I read that David Berkowitz might be one of those.

  6. Steve H. Says:

    Interesting parallel between Cosby and Trump: they got in more trouble by offending people than by wronging them. Cosby got convicted because he told black people to be accountable. That made Social Justice Warriors mad, so he was accused of rape and then tried. The single biggest source of Trump’s problems isn’t his policies. It’s the body of insults he directed toward the left-wing press.

    The press crucifies all conservative politicians, but their filthy, childish attacks on Trump are unsurpassed, and the reason is that he calls them out on their bias and lies.

    Trump told journalists to pull their pants up!

  7. Rick C Says:

    “To answer that question, I would have to be familiar with all the evidence and the complete trial record, and I would have to be an attorney with a lot of experience in criminal appeals. I still wouldn’t be able to promise anything, because courts are capricious and inept.”

    Sorry, Steve, I wasn’t asking for that level of specificity–I just wanted to know if that kind of apparent misconduct by the judge could have a decent likelihood of leading to a successful appeal in general.

  8. Steve H. Says:

    Don’t be sorry. I was preaching to myself. I don’t want to fall prey to the temptation to draw legal conclusions without doing any real homework.

    What a judge can and can’t get away with is a complicated question. Some errors are trivial, and some are reversible. Also, the mistakes judges make are usually referred to as error, not misconduct.