XPost: alt.niggers, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics
XPost: alt.disney

Bill Cosby did not walk free because he wasn’t guilty of
drugging and then sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004 —
or as he preferred to see it, of “dancing outside” of his
marriage. That’s absolutely not what the Pennsylvania Supreme
Court said.

But it’s also wrong to say that he escaped justice on a
technicality. He escaped justice because a prosecutor’s office
violated its previous agreement not to charge him. Go ahead and
testify in a civil suit by Constand, they told him, because
you’re not going to be charged.

That deal was incredibly stupid, but it was also binding. Yet
after Cosby waived his rights and implicated himself, a
successor to the DA who’d made that agreement decided to charge
him anyway. Which wasn’t either fair or constitutional.

And as sick as I am to see a man accused by more than 50 women
dance outside of his prison cell, I don’t think I get to be
against prosecutorial wrongdoing only when it suits me.

When then-Wyandotte County prosecutor Ed Brancart cheated his
way to a murder conviction against Kansas City, Kansas, mailman
Olin “Pete” Coones in 2009, the result was that an innocent man
served 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. That
turned out to be a death sentence, since by the time Coones was
freed last November, the cancer that had gone undetected behind
bars was so advanced that he died in February, at age 64, after
just 108 days of freedom.

Who paid for Brancart’s willingness to suborn perjury, suppress
exculpatory evidence and present testimony that was “patently
untrue?” Not him, of course; he kept his well-paid job
prosecuting Medicaid fraud for Kansas Attorney General Derek
Schmidt.

Coones and his family lost everything as a result, but the rest
of us lost something, too. Not just because Kansans paid for his
incarceration, but because of the cascade of wrong actions that
his unjust conviction led to — including the merciless bullying
of his kids, by their teachers as well as their classmates.

But if I’m furious that Brancart coerced testimony from a
mentally ill inmate to put a good man behind bars, then I can’t
be OK with what Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, prosecutors
pulled, even against a man I consider a prolific criminal.

I can’t be appalled that then-WyCo prosecutor Terra Morehead
told Niko Quinn, “I’ll throw your Black ass in jail” unless she
testified against Lamonte McIntyre, a man Quinn knew to be
innocent, but then approve of the “coercive bait and switch”
that allowed Cosby to be charged.

I can’t hope — and oh, I do hope — that the police and
prosecutorial wrongdoing that led to the wrongful murder
convictions of Celester McKinney and his cousin Brian Betts in
KCK 23 years ago is soon corrected in court, but also be willing
to watch a different prosecutorial wrong stand.

For all the rape victims who see Cosby’s raised victory sign and
wonder how many dozen violated women would have to come forward
to not only get a conviction but make it stick, I share your
disgust.

But I’m just as sorry that his prosecutors will pay no price for
their overreach beyond some embarrassment.

It’s because prosecutors are almost never punished for their
shortcuts and perfidy that they feel so free to tell the kind of
lies that ruin lives, and even end them. That’s what has to
change to keep the innocent from being sent away in the first
place, and to keep the guilty from ever walking free.

https://news.yahoo.com/bill-cosby-not-free-technicality-
100000012.html

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