Judge sets new Bill Cosby trial date for November.
Bill Cosby will go on trial on sexual assault charges a second time in Pennsylvania on Nov. 6, a judge ordered Thursday.
Judge Steven O’Neill, who presided over Cosby’s 11-day first trial that ended in a mistrial, ordered the second trial to take place in the same courthouse in Montgomery County outside Philadelphia.
Attorneys in the case, including District Attorney Kevin Steele and Cosby defense lawyers Brian McMonagle and Angela Agrusa, were ordered to notify witnesses and make them available to testify when needed.
O’Neill also ordered them to submit proposed jury questions and instructions no later than Oct. 30.
It is not clear where the jury will be selected; for the first trial, the judge and the lawyers traveled to Pittsburgh to pick a jury. Those 12, plus six alternates, were then taken to Norristown, Pa., and sequestered for the trial, which included six days of testimony.
Cosby’s lawyers rested their case after about five minutes and a few questions to a prosecution witness, signaling the Cosby defense strategy of arguing that prosecutors had failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
After the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict, following five days of deliberations for 52 hours, O’Neill declared a mistrial.
Cosby, who remains out on $1 million bond, is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent sexual assault stemming from an encounter with Andrea Constand at his home in Montgomery County in 2004. She says he drugged and molested her; he says their encounter was consensual.
Immediately after O’Neill declared the mistrial, on June 17, Steele told the court he intended to retry Cosby, a vow he later repeated at a press conference. He said Constand “deserved a verdict” in the case.
So far, several jurors have come forward, most anonymously, to talk about what happened in the jury room and why the seven men and five women could not agree on a verdict.
One juror, Bobby Dugan, 21, spoke to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and to ABC’s Good Morning America, saying the jury tried hard, some to the point of tears, but were unable to convict Cosby for a common reason criminal trials fail, especially so long after the alleged crime.
“Evidence, ” he said. “We all said it a million times in the room. If there’s other evidence, more substantial evidence, we would have had a better verdict than deadlock.”
It is not clear what new evidence might be introduced by prosecutors at the new trial. But Steele could renew his motion to call as witnesses more of the five-dozen women who have accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting them in episodes dating back to the mid-1960s. Some of Cosby’s accusers attended the first trial to support Constand.
For the first trial, O’Neill ruled that Steele could only call one such “prior bad acts” witness to testify against Cosby.
