Home » The Cosby verdict and the law

Comments

The Cosby verdict and the law — 12 Comments

  1. Neo,

    I, too, do not know whether Cosby is truly guilty (as opposed to legally guilty) of these offenses. I think, however when one considers your post in conjunction with other notable prosecutorial/judicial bullying (the Ted Stevens trial and verdict comes instantly to mind) I don’t think it unreasonable to say that this goes well beyond an “imperfect system.”

    Like Obama’s weaponizing of the IRS, the judicial system seems to me to be fundamentally broken, perhaps irrevocably so. With qualified and total immunity the prosecutors and judges have set themselves as an unaccountable aristocracy deciding for whom the laws will apply and for whom they will not.

    At best this makes our formerly remarkable system look like that of a banana republic. At worst, it brings us closer to the threshold of anarchy.

  2. I’ve been debating a poster at another site who contends that it’s more important to nail Trump for something, anything, for which he can be tossed out of office. And by whatever means necessary.

    He claims that we should never want a person like Trump to be the POTUS and above the law “…just like in a South American banana republic….”

    It seems some would consider East Germany under the thumb of the Stasi to be the ‘good ol’ days.’

  3. Unfortunately, I have to agree with T.

    I’ve seen enough examples these last few years to conclude that the kind of legal system we were taught we have–and perhaps once did have–is just not there, it’s trashed, it’s gone.

    There’s a shell there, but what goes on underneath it bears no real resemblance to the rule of law, the even-handed application of blind justice I naively thought operated in this country. I guess I didn’t pay enough attention to the actual lessons I learned in my one horrible year in law school.

    You got a prosecutor or a DA who, for some benefit to himself, wants to pin you to the wall, he can do it.

    You have enough “juice”–you’re wealthy, or connected, or famous, or can whip up and ride a wave of popular prejudice in your favor–and you’re likely to get off–see the OJ trial, see Hillary.

    The State has the resources, and you don’t–see Gen. Flynn.

    You want a way to peel away citizen’s support for our country, this situation is a good way to do it.

    Then, when you add to it the obvious corruption in Washington, where our supposed elected “representatives” ignore the very plainly expressed wishes of the “little people” who elected Trump and them, but sure are eager to do the bidding of “big men,” their major donors, to us “little people’s” detriment?

    Well let’s just say that the whole unsavory, disgusting mess–and getting more and more unsavory and disgusting as more evidence and examples pile up–is turning more and people into cynics, who are doubtful about our “American experiment” succeeding, when right now it seems more and more like it’s in a very precarious situation, balanced on a knife edge, on life support.

  4. Snow on Pine:

    Oh, I agree that there is plenty of cause for cynicism and extreme concern. But I’ve not thrown in the towel on it completely yet.

  5. I am very skeptical of the whole “me too” movement. It is as if we are to believe that all women are angels. I think Cosby is probably guilty of some of the things he is accused of, but why would any normal woman meet with him alone and take pills he gave them. There are probably some who wanted a job or money and were willing to take the risk. Don’t go around with your boobs hanging out if you aren’t advertising yourself as a sex object. Get another job if your boss is a creep. And after 15 or 20 years, see a shrink if you are still traumatized. Lots of people have gotten over worse things.

  6. Please note that Bill Cosby had apparently been doing this for quite a while, and (as in so many such cases) nobody did anything about it, or it was expected of powerful men. But another part is that Cosby, as a powerful and popular black actor and comedian, was insulated from notice.

    UNTIL — UNTIL, he “left the liberal reservation” and started saying illiberal things like “All you black men, pull up your pants and support your children!” Within a year of those comments, he lost his invulnerability and was destroyed.

    Frankly, any man who would do these things deserves to be punished. But there’s a definite odor or liberal orthodoxy in play here.

  7. Actually, both white Christian and historically black churches as well as pagans, use a method to control people.

    It usually involves sending women as honeypots to lure leaders of ministries into compromising positions. This is then recorded and now you have blackmail on an entire organization. Some of it was just due to men shopping around for prostitutes and whores, yes, but much of it was a honeypot organization by one group against another church.

    Cosby is just a good target for these things. They’ve had him under their control for awhile now, because he was one of the few “black middle class” actor personas on tv.

    They aren’t going to let that kind of agent go rogue.

    Trum was put into the same situation .That is why the Left is freaking out over why revealing his history doesn’t work. It worked for everybody else they targeted…

    With qualified and total immunity the prosecutors and judges have set themselves as an unaccountable aristocracy deciding for whom the laws will apply and for whom they will not.

    I see it as something slightly different. The cause of why lawyers/judges and journalists have so much power is because previous generations outsourced their citizen powers to experts, self proclaimed elites, and specialists to do the job normal American voters didn’t want to do.

    The laws become so unreadable and incomprehensible, people felt they needed lawyers to interpret the law. Information became so complicated and technology so high, people thought they needed Cronkite and Mass Communications (Indoctrination via propaganda) to tell them what is “news”.

  8. I’ve been a prosecutor in Pennsylvania since 1982, and I have never heard of the doctrine of chances. Weird. The testimony of other victims CAN qualify (and rightly so) as evidence of common plan, scheme, or design, if similar enough—but it’s just wrong to do this 30 or more years after the fact. I am almost 100 % certain that Cosby is a gross sexual assaulting pig—yet I agree totally that these trials stretching the statute of limitations beyond recognition are not what I want to see in our justice system.

  9. Ymar Sakar Says:
    April 27th, 2018 at 9:57 pm

    Cosby is just a good target for these things. They’ve had him under their control for awhile now, because he was one of the few “black middle class” actor personas on tv.

    They aren’t going to let that kind of agent go rogue.

    Trum was put into the same situation .That is why the Left is freaking out over why revealing his history doesn’t work. It worked for everybody else they targeted…
    * * *
    I’m actually surprised that Mr. Trump didn’t just say, “Yes, Ms. Daniels and I had a relationship; so what?” – but he was still being cautious before the election, until it became very clear that his supporters were no longer going to allow the Left to blackmail the Right , for doing the same things they were doing without consequences.

    BTW, I have not yet seen (although I may have missed it) where anyone points out the yuge difference between non-consensual forced sexual favors extorted without payment (aside from “you get to keep your job”), and hiring — or at least wining & dining with party favors — a person who knows from the beginning what the “meeting” is for.

    Neither activity meets my moral standards (abstinence before marriage, fidelity after), but they are categorically different.

    Oh, BTOW,* on that #MeToo thing: it’s great until it hits YOU.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tom-brokaw-nbc-news-correspondent-groping-kissing-woman-accusation-linda-vester-a8325156.html

    I totally agree with RigelDog on actually limiting the statute of limitations, especially if there are no current allegations (or even any within, say, 5 years), but what’s good enough for Roy Moore is good enough for Tom Brokaw: since the Left has set the rules for this game they ought to have to play it, especially their journalists.

    Live by the innuendo, die by the innuendo.

    *ByTheOtherWay

  10. A lot of Trum’s supporters are former or current Demoncrats that can’t get off of pron.

    They aren’t going to be like the Evangelicals in putting up a tough front on that.

    The breakdown I did during the primary season when Trum was up was that his supporters came from 3 factions:

    Betrayed Republicans like the Tea Party
    Former Democrats or moderates such as in the Alt Right
    I forgot what the third one was. Probably the rest of the conservative Alt Right.

    This 3 fold mix was surprising enough that HRC’s voter city rigged elections didn’t account for all the rural white votes that would normally go Democrat.

    Hollywood’s sexual perversion and evil is a lot deeper than what the “metoo” movement illustrates. The twitter thing is mostly just a damage control method.

    If operatives couldn’t cover up evidence of operations, we learned to just use disinformation to overload everybody’s ability to parse and analyze data. It was almost as good. Blown cover as cover.

  11. Another aspect of the trial that has seriously bothered me and which has dropped out of a lot of the coverage has been the admission into evidence of Cosby’s testimony in his civil trial. The jurors have now stated publicly that his admission in that testimony of giving Qualudes to women was critical to their guilty verdict. This testimony was compelled from Cosby in a civil trial only after an earlier county prosecutor agreed not to press criminal charges (otherwise it would be a clear 5th amendment violation). Why the county was allowed to void the earlier agreement and then use the civil testimony at trial is beyond me. How does this not nullify the 5th amendment?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>