Jury selected for Bill Cosby trial
The jury has been selected for Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial, which will begin next month in Norristown, Pennsylvania, according to ABC News.
Cosby’s defense team was quick to criticize the make-up of the jury, which is almost split down the middle between men (7) and women (5), but only has two Black jurors. This will surely play into the narrative that Cosby’s being set up because of his status as a prominent Black man. But the selection of this jury is worthy of a closer look.
For example, with two out of 12 jurors being Black, they represent 17 percent. Which is more than the 13 percent in the population of Allegheny County. Also, only 10 percent of the potential jurors were Black, with 10 out of 100 being so. And this all happened after Cosby’s attorney’s were allowed to pick jurors from a different county to get a more diverse group.
Given the jury’s make up, race will likely be viewed as an undeniable part of the narrative going forward. And not the fact that Cosby is on trial for one of a string of accused assaults spanning decades.
“I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel her say anything,” he said during a deposition in a civil suit over this same assault. “And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.”
That’s Cosby’s way of saying that things were consensual.
Court proceedings will start on June 5 in Montgomery County as the world will surely be watching to see what the future holds for the 79-year-old.
You ignor that the DA used his first two pre-emptions to eliminate 2 black jurors. You ignore that 10 of first 11 jurors selected were white, despite 16 of the first 100 potential jurors being black. Cosby had to use a Batson challenge showing systematic racism in order to get a second black person on the jury.
DA originally wanted 13 accusers, 12 white women and a black woman to testify against Cosby. This meant that Cosby would have to face 14 unconnected trials at once, a breach of fundamental unfairness in law unheard of in any Pennsylvanian court case in history. The judge did allow the black woman as a second accuser, thus insuring that Cosby would not get a fair trial. He apparently chose the black woman because he didn’t want it to seem that Cosby was being prosecuted by only whites. DA Steele also chose a black woman prosecutor to try the case for the same reason.
The DA and Judge selected a second accuser who was a black woman who claimed that she had been assaulted by Cosby 30 years ago. No accused person in the history of Montgomery County has been forced to fight against a second accuser on the dubious “bad behavior” law, who had ever claimed bad behavior more than 15 years prior. Allowing a prior bad behavior accuser from 30 years earlier doubled the previous record.
It turned out that the second accuser had absolutely no evidence that she had been assaulted by Cosby. The D.A. put on the woman’s mother to testify that she had told her about the assault and also the woman’s lawyer in a case against Cosby’s talent agency – William Morris Agency from 1996. It turned out that none of the testimony that the woman gave in this case could be found. It mysteriously disappeared. The lawyer said that he remembered the woman saying that she had sex with Cosby in 1990, not 1996. The mother could not remember when she was told about the assault and claimed she had never talked with her daughter about it again. The bad behavior law was never intended to be used as a second trial as the judge and DA used it in this case.