Bill Cosby’s not free on a technicality. He’s free because his prosecutors cheated
Bill Cosby did not walk free because he wasn’t guilty of drugging and then sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004 — or as he preferred to see it, of “dancing outside” of his marriage. That’s absolutely not what the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said.
But it’s also wrong to say that he escaped justice on a technicality. He escaped justice because a prosecutor’s office violated its previous agreement not to charge him. Go ahead and testify in a civil suit by Constand, they told him, because you’re not going to be charged.
That deal was incredibly stupid, but it was also binding. Yet after Cosby waived his rights and implicated himself, a successor to the DA who’d made that agreement decided to charge him anyway. Which wasn’t either fair or constitutional.
And as sick as I am to see a man accused by more than 50 women dance outside of his prison cell, I don’t think I get to be against prosecutorial wrongdoing only when it suits me.
When then-Wyandotte County prosecutor Ed Brancart cheated his way to a murder conviction against Kansas City, Kansas, mailman Olin “Pete” Coones in 2009, the result was that an innocent man served 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. That turned out to be a death sentence, since by the time Coones was freed last November, the cancer that had gone undetected behind bars was so advanced that he died in February, at age 64, after just 108 days of freedom.
Who paid for Brancart’s willingness to suborn perjury, suppress exculpatory evidence and present testimony that was “patently untrue?” Not him, of course; he kept his well-paid job prosecuting Medicaid fraud for Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt.
Coones and his family lost everything as a result, but the rest of us lost something, too. Not just because Kansans paid for his incarceration, but because of the cascade of wrong actions that his unjust conviction led to — including the merciless bullying of his kids, by their teachers as well as their classmates.
But if I’m furious that Brancart coerced testimony from a mentally ill inmate to put a good man behind bars, then I can’t be OK with what Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, prosecutors pulled, even against a man I consider a prolific criminal.
I can’t be appalled that then-WyCo prosecutor Terra Morehead told Niko Quinn, “I’ll throw your Black ass in jail” unless she testified against Lamonte McIntyre, a man Quinn knew to be innocent, but then approve of the “coercive bait and switch” that allowed Cosby to be charged.
I can’t hope — and oh, I do hope — that the police and prosecutorial wrongdoing that led to the wrongful murder convictions of Celester McKinney and his cousin Brian Betts in KCK 23 years ago is soon corrected in court, but also be willing to watch a different prosecutorial wrong stand.
For all the rape victims who see Cosby’s raised victory sign and wonder how many dozen violated women would have to come forward to not only get a conviction but make it stick, I share your disgust.
But I’m just as sorry that his prosecutors will pay no price for their overreach beyond some embarrassment.
It’s because prosecutors are almost never punished for their shortcuts and perfidy that they feel so free to tell the kind of lies that ruin lives, and even end them. That’s what has to change to keep the innocent from being sent away in the first place, and to keep the guilty from ever walking free.
