The Pennsylvania Supreme Court may have ended Bill Cosby’s prison sentence and sent him home to Montgomery County, but the specter of more prosecution may still follow him.
With his 2018 indecent aggravated assault conviction overturned, he is immune to further criminal prosecution on charges that he drugged and molested former Temple women’s basketball coach Andrea Constand in 2004. However, Cosby still faces a years-old civil suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, brought by Judy Huth, who accuses the actor of sexually assaulting her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974.
Huth was 15 years old at the time.
Cosby's lawyer Michael Freedman stood before a judge in Los Angeles on Wednesday to say that the actor plans to hold his tongue about any allegations of assault, even if he goes on a comedy tour, for fear that it could lead to prosecution against him, according to a status conference report examined by The Hollywood Reporter.
Filed in 2014, the Huth case was put on hold while he was being prosecuted in the Constand case. Now, since Pennsylvania's highest court has said Constand's legal team unfairly disregarded a 2004 agreement that protected Cosby against prosecution, he should be free to testify in Huth's civil case.
Freedman says, saying no matter what happened with the Constand case or his criminal conviction, Cosby's constitutional right to remain silent is still intact, according to the report.
"This is particularly so where numerous states have no criminal statutes of limitations for sex crimes. ... Having already been forced to face a malicious criminal prosecution that resulted in an unlawful three-year incarceration, Defendant is not confident that such a risk does not still exist in this jurisdiction and others," Freedman said, according to the report.
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This harks back to that 2004 agreement at the center of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision to overturn Cosby's conviction. The DA in Montgomery County at the time, Bruce Castor — who some may remember as Donald Trump's attorney in his second impeachment trial — declined to charge Cosby in the Constand sexual assault case, but Cosby was forced to testify in a separate civil proceeding, implicating himself in the crime. Castor's successor used those protected statements against Cosby at his trial, which the Supreme Court said were fundamentally unfair, no matter who the DA is now.
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Legal experts hastened to underscore that the decision was based on the prosecutorial rule book, not Cosby's guilt or innocence.
Freedman says Cosby now has no reason to believe that, if he is forced to testify in a deposition, his words won't be used against him by prosecutors. Therefore, until a judge tells him he has no Fifth Amendment rights, Cosby will continue to use them, Freedman said.
In fact, Cosby and his attorney want Huth's allegations to be made completely legally out of bounds.
California civil law now allows victims of childhood sex abuse to sue, as an adult, any time within five years of discovering a psychological injury caused by the abuse. This makes Huth's case, stemming from sexual abuse alleged to have occurred nearly 50 years ago, potentially viable.
But Cosby wants to challenge the constitutionality of easing the statute of limitations on sexual assault charges in that way — something his attorney says neither the California Supreme Court nor the United States Supreme Court have addressed.
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