Bill Cosby’s latest move to overturn sex-crimes conviction lists ‘trial errors’ by judge

PHILADELPHIA  — Bill Cosby’s lawyers filed a list of nearly a dozen alleged trial errors Tuesday as they appeal his sexual assault conviction and three- to 10-year prison term.

The defense asked to have the 81-year-old disgraced comedian released from a suburban Philadelphia prison while his appeal proceeds, but their pleas have so far been rejected.

The lawyers said some of the alleged errors include their belief that trial Judge Steven O’Neill had a feud with a pretrial witness, the ex-prosecutor who had declined to charge Cosby a decade earlier.

They said O’Neill’s decisions to preside over the case, let five other accusers testify, air Cosby’s prior deposition testimony about quaaludes and dismiss the ex-prosecutor’s promise not to charge him are mistakes that warrant a new trial.

“The trial court erred in failing to disclose his bias against District Attorney (Bruce) Castor, and in failing to recuse himself, prior to determining (his) credibility,” wrote lawyer Brian Perry of Harrisburg, the latest of more than a dozen lawyers to represent Cosby in the case.

A jury convicted Cosby at a spring retrial of drugging and molesting a Temple University employee in 2004, in what became the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.

Cosby — whose estimated fortune from his popular TV shows, comedy tours and product pitches once topped $400 million — was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting accuser Andrea Constand. The entertainer, who is legally blind, spends his days in a one-man cell and private day room, in a new state prison about 20 miles from his sprawling estate near Philadelphia, where the crime occurred.

In a deposition in Constand’s 2005 civil suit, Cosby called the 2004 encounter consensual and his feelings for her romantic. Constand considered him a mentor with close ties to her boss at Temple, where she worked for the women’s basketball team.

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