COSBY NOT FOUND GUILTY

Victory! (Kinda sorta.)
(Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/
NurPhoto via Getty Images)
ED GAUTHIER


Judge Steven O'Neill, presiding over the Bill Cosby sexual assault trial, yesterday declared a mistrial.

The decision came after jurors reported being deadlocked (6 to 6) after almost a week of deliberation, being officially logged in for over 50 hours.

Predictably the losing prosecution side has stated that they wish to retry Cosby yet again, which would be an extremely bad move. Such a risky gambit always looks very double jeopardy-ish, since one can't be tried twice for the same crime.

So any further action will now look like plain harassment. Whatever happens, the fact is now that the comedian will most likely never be given even one day of any jail sentence from any trial.

The jury declared that they were "hopelessly deadlocked" about whether the comedian drugged and molested Andrea Constand in 2004. Yes, we get the pun, and it was indeed an attempted con on the stand.

Not being found guilty prompted the comedian's spokesman to claim that "Mr. Cosby's power is back."

Actually, never previously being found guilty of anything, he never lost any power, and if anything has only gained more.

The veteran sitcom star has even talked about producing further projects in showbiz.

Meanwhile, the prosecution - or should we say the seemingly endless persecution - has been damaged beyond any repair.

Just like many other instances of famous black men who have dated many white women - Kobie Bryant, Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson, etc., this particular anti-celebrity angle is obviously racist. Sure, it doesn't take any long investigation to conclude they all may have been "cheating" in one sense or the other, but one shouldn't be thrown in jail for that.

The headline hysteria-raised public apparently needs to be reminded every once in awhile that trying to score and mate with a woman is hardly the same as trying to stalk and murder a woman. Serial daters are not serial killers.

If such were the case, trying to get legal age woman intoxicated enough to have sex would result in most men in the entire country being tossed into the local lockup.

But getting back to the Cosby scenario in particular, the usual "dozens of other women appearing from out of the woodwork" did nothing to injure his reputation, either. They were all by definition lesser possible cases, while the main "wronged woman" they lined up behind was, in the end, not victorious. Which ergo always makes their already tenuous grasp so flimsy that it vanishes.

It is also worth noting that the same type of "woodwork" women also regularly appear during the trials of the likes of the afore-mentioned celebs. Once these accusing females and their lawyers smell blood - i.e. money - the ranks of the too-far-after-the-incident crowd starts to swell.

It's like a lottery for losers - they know that they don't win if they don't play.

Although Cosby jurors were instructed to focus mainly on the allegations by Constand, many lawyers in recent similar cases in the last few decades have been allowing the old "career criminal" ploy to rear its ugly head.

For instance, supposedly juries are never urged to base a current burglary trial of some guy based on his past, especially when it includes previous burglaries. Yet today's lawyers and judges (and even the press) seem to oddly have no problem using that same old "career criminal" move to smear the reputation of many celebrities.

And now all sleezy gold-diggers are "surviving victims," huh? Well, good luck with that, politically correct fans. The loss of putting Cosby in the can may well set off feelings of hopelessness among accusing women worldwide, and rightly so.

Anyone going to court to attack someone else has to show evidence, not emotions.

This man has survived consistent public accusations by many women over many years, which means he is innocent, not "slippery" or "teflon," etc. Other baseless gold-diggers might reason, what chance do they have? Hopefully none, anymore.

Even if this Cosby case, so botched up by the prosecution, goes to another trial yet again, smart lawyers frankly don't expect that any further proceedings will end much differently.

Meanwhile, it was a hasty decision by the prosecutor to pronounce instantly that they planned to retry the case. Any decision to do so, where the jury is deadlocked, is a tough call to make, and should have been weighed carefully.

But instead the prosecutor announced literally the moment the jury filed out of the courtroom that they would retry it, which is ridiculous. As if he already knew he wasn't going to win this time around.

It is also worth noting that a close friend of Constand admitted to overhearing some statements of her saying that "it might be good to set up someone rich or famous."

That's pretty much of a credibility-crusher right there, folks. That kind of truth can be quite deadly to any kind of "revenge trial" the prosecution might be fantasizing about for the future.

So if anything further in this farce is even attempted, it will be virtually impossible to pick an unbiased jury, anyway. And even if a jury was somehow chosen, the resulting trial disaster would go far beyond mere "reasonable doubt," to say the least.

It's pretty rare to do a whole new trial after a hung jury. It's also very tough for the government to justify such vast expenditures just because things didn't go their way.

The case has gotten way too old, and it mainly consists of "he said - she said" stuff, so there's no forensic evidence or anything similar.

Most any such court conflicts that have been tried several times usually tend to be murder cases only.

And as has been well established, this most certainly is not one of those.

Then why has so much time, energy and money been wasted on this?

Must be a slow news decade.