Bill Cosby has been sentenced to state prison after being convicted of sexual assault. “This was a serious crime,” Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O’Neill said. “Mr. Cosby, this has all circled back to you. The day has come, the time has come.” In April Cosby was convicted by a jury of of seven men and five women for the 2004 sexual assault of Andrea Constand. Two of the 12 jurors, a man and a woman are black, the rest are white. All are residents of Montgomery County, a predominantly white suburban area north of Philadelphia. Some critics are saying he was not fairly represented by a jury of his peers. During jury selection, the female black jury was initially rejected by the prosecution. After Ms. Bliss, a defense attorney for Mr Cosby, made a Batson claim, in which a lawyer objects to a challenge brought by the other side, claiming that it was motivated by race, sex or ethnicity, the juror was eventually let on the panel, which brought the number of blacks on the panel to two. Cosby did not testify at the trial and has spoken very little publicly since his criminal trial began. Once however, when prosecutors claimed he had a private plane and asked the judge to revoke his bail, Cosby stood up in court and yelled, “He doesn’t have a plane, you a**hole,” referring to himself in the third person. The defense had asked that Cosby remain free on bail pending appeal. That motion was turned downed and Cosby will have to report immediately to prison to began serving his term.
Bill Cosby first trial ended in a mistrial, when the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on any of three counts of aggravated indecent assault of accuser Andrea Constand, following 52 hours of deliberation over five days. Cosby was not found guilty and was not acquitted. A unanimous verdict is required by law, you have to be acquitted or found guilty. It is generally thought the reason behind retrying Cosby after the mistrial was the number of jurors which voted guilty. Had there been more than half of the jurors voting for acquittal then the case may have never gone back to court. Cosby’s sentence came just hours after O’Neill ruled that the convicted comedian is a “sexually violent predator,“ a designation that includes registration as a sex offender and lifelong notification and counseling requirements. The victim at the center of the fall of Cosby, Andrea Constand, gave a victim impact statement which said in part, “Before the assault, “I knew who I was and I liked who I was … Nothing could have prepared me for an evening of January 2004, when life as I knew it came to an abrupt halt. Bill Cosby took my beautiful, healthy young spirit and crushed it. He robbed me of my health and vitality, my open nature, and my trust in myself and others.”
Incarceration will be a stark change for the comedian, whose net worth was estimated in 2016 by Fortune magazine at $400 million, with $100 million invested in real estate, including homes in New York, Massachusetts and Nevada. Once Cosby arrives behind bars, he will face an “incarceration reception process” to determine his healthcare and psychological treatment needs, his security level, and to which of 22 male prisons he will be sent. He will be one of just 83 inmates aged 80 or older, and one of very few who are legally blind. Cosby will most likely be assigned a sighted inmate who will assist and lead him through the facility. In Pa, prisoners stand to be counted four times every day, work jobs for as little as 19 cents an hour, face strict wake-up calls and bedtimes, wear cocoa-brown uniforms, and go by inmate numbers, rather than their names. Prison administrators typically separate high-profile inmates from the general population, not necessarily for their comfort, but more for their safety. That means he could get a cell to himself, at minimum, with guards keeping a closer eye.
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