Bill Cosby is reportedly going to be released from prison today after the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled that his conviction was the result of an improperly-conducted trial. As I understand it — and real analysts are still scrambling to analyze the ruling — the state's high court said that since Cosby was on trial for one specific alleged molestation, the judge should not have allowed testimony by alleged victims of other alleged crimes to establish a "pattern."
I have no idea if, going strictly by the law as written, that's a proper ruling. It does seem odd to suggest that the fact that he raped a lot of other women is not relevant (or should not be relevant) to the question of whether he raped the one in question. But in this country, guilty people do sometimes go free because of judicial error.
I doubt this is going to change any minds anywhere about whether he was guilty or not. The ruling does not address that question. It merely says that the judge erred to allow something he allowed. It's going to cause a lot of people to say that when you have his kind of money, you can always get the kind of lawyers who can make things go your way…and that view is true more often than it should be.
You can already hear the disappointment of those who celebrated his conviction. It showed it was possible that wealthy and powerful men could be held accountable for preying on those who lacked wealth and power…and now, wealth and power seems to have won in the end. Then again, it's not like Cosby wasn't punished at all and is leaving with a solid case that he was innocent. There must be lots of rich guys out there who were dissuaded from doing the kind of thing he did because they thought, "If they can nail him, they can nail me." I don't think they'll change their minds about that now. But it does seem very wrong for William Henry Cosby Jr. to be a free man.
You wonder — well, I wonder — what he thinks he's going to do now. Does he think he has a chance of getting back some of his old respect and career? Is he going to try? Or is he just going to stay in whatever mansions he has left and stay out of the public eye for the rest of his life? If he's smart, he'll do the latter…but if he was smart, he wouldn't have done the things that caused all those women to line up to testify against him in the first place.