Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "BREAKING: Bill Cosby Released After Conviction Overturned" video.

That's...not how the Fifth works. In the US, police and prosecutors can lie to you about verbal agreements, and they aren't beholden to promises when they're not in writing and witnessed. 99% of the time that's a bad thing, but here, no.
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This was the decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, not the Supreme Court of the United States. Mentioned at 0:06.
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Actually, they can, so long as the deal isn't finalized by a judge. Since this appears to've been a verbal agreement which no judge accepted, I (a lay person) can't understand why this conviction was overturned.
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I've read the PSC decision and it seems, to me anyway, that you and many others aren't quite representing this accurately. You're saying that D.A. Castor gave Cosby a deal of immunity so that he could get information for a different case. This is not quite right, according to Castor's testimony and the PSC decision. In the decision, the Court states that Castor determined that there was insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute Cosby on behalf of Andrea Constand, and he communicated to Cosby's lawyer, Phillips, as much, stating his opinion that because he had no plans to prosecute, Cosby could not take the Fifth in civil court, with which opinion Cosby's lawyer agreed. Castor would have had no role in a civil trial. In the US, a person cannot be compelled (eg by subpoena) to incriminate themselves under threat of sanction (eg prosecution). Because Cosby did not face prosecution and would be incapable of incriminating himself, the thinking was that he could not take the Fifth. The agreement was entirely verbal and corroborated by Castor and Phillips. Moreover, in testimony, Castor states, "So I have heard banter in the courtroom and in the press the term “agreement,” but everybody has used the wrong word. I told [Cosby’s attorney at the time, Walter] Phillips that I had decided that, because of defects in the case, that the case could not be won and that I was going to make a public statement that we were not going to charge Mr. Cosby. "I told him that I was making it as the sovereign Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and, in my legal opinion, that meant that Mr. Cosby would not be allowed to take the Fifth Amendment in the subsequent civil suit that Andrea Constand’s lawyers had told us they wanted to bring. "But those two things were not connected one to the other." I'm not a legal scholar or a judge, but this sounds less like an official agreement than two lawyers sharing a professional opinion, and that's exactly what the trial court thought. The PSC decision seems to be based on the assumption that Castor, by communicating the likely cause-and-effect of his decision to not prosecute—a decision he believed to be absolute but which he did not solidify in any formal document or press release—constituted an agreement. In other words, the mere belief that one possesses immunity, according to the PSC, is enough to grant one immunity. It's a very bizarre decision, and it's no wonder the court was split 4-3.
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@aralornwolf3140 Castor just seems like a swell guy. Here's a statement he couldn't recall making regarding Constand's accusations. "Likewise, he did not recall the specific statement, “[i]n Pennsylvania we charged people for criminal conduct. We don’t charge people with making a mistake or doing something foolish;” however, he indicated that it is a true statement."
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@christophermarang.3569 Um, no sweetie, I didn't. Be less careless with how you write, and it won't take so long to correct you.
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@christophermarang.3569 Have you read the decision? Oh because I have! my sweet buttery muffin top. And the notion that Castor granted Cosby immunity is very dubious. There was no written agreement beyond a press release which explicitly says that Castor reserves the right to revisit the case (he later gave multiple, contradictory readings of this sentence), which is why the trial court read the press release as a statement of prosecutorial discretion, not immunity. The PSC decision also notes that, "Mr. Castor testified that he could not recall any other case where he made this type of binding legal analysis in Montgomery County. He testified that in a half dozen cases during his tenure in the District Attorney’s office, someone would attempt to assert the Fifth Amendment in a preexisting civil case. The judge in that case would then call Mr. Castor to determine if he intended to prosecute the person asserting the privilege. He could confirm that he did not and the claim of privilege would be denied. Mr. Castor was unable to name a case in which this happened." So without an unequivocal statement of immunity, and by not invoking the Fifth during discovery for a civil trial, Cosby and his lawyers left his immunity ambiguous enough to make this appeal. Had he invoked the Fifth, Castor would have had to resolve the issue one way or the other. But, contrary to what you're saying, there was no written "deal" for immunity even if that had been the intent.
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@christophermarang.3569 And I'll try to be really clear. The notion that there was a "deal" is absurd if you actually read the facts of the case. Castor believed he could not bring charges against Cosby. He had no leverage, and he wasn't getting anything out of Cosby. The PSC decision notes, "Mr. Castor further indicated, “Mr. Phillips never agreed to anything in exchange for Mr. Cosby not being prosecuted.” " What happened is that Castor could not prosecute, and as a consequence of that he and Cosby's lawyers believed that Cosby could not invoke the Fifth in a civil trial. That's not a "deal" under any definition.
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@christophermarang.3569 Ok so you were wrong, like I originally said. Cool cool. And the PSC was split 4-3 on retrial, but whatever.
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What in the fuck.
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Reading the PSC decision, it's worse than I thought. D.A. Castor not only never provided a written agreement; this "agreement" consisted entirely in his sharing a professional opinion with Cosby's lawyer that, since Castor was not going to bring charges, Cosby wouldn't be able to take the Fifth during a civil trial. And, indeed, Cosby never invoked the Fifth during his deposition. If he had, Castor may have had to get involved and clarify the situation—that Cosby effectively had immunity. But because he didn't, the PSC has been able to conclude that because Cosby believed he had immunity, without any formal declaration, he in fact did. Castor: "So I have heard banter in the courtroom and in the press the term “agreement,” but everybody has used the wrong word. I told [Cosby’s attorney at the time, Walter] Phillips that I had decided that, because of defects in the case, that the case could not be won and that I was going to make a public statement that we were not going to charge Mr. Cosby. "I told him that I was making it as the sovereign Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and, in my legal opinion, that meant that Mr. Cosby would not be allowed to take the Fifth Amendment in the subsequent civil suit that Andrea Constand’s lawyers had told us they wanted to bring. But those two things were not connected one to the other."
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@arraymac227 Have you read the decision?
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@arraymac227 And that's not a promise or a deal. As the two dissenting opinions point out, 1) the only indication of a "promise" is a press release which includes language that reads like an exercise in prosecutorial discretion, which is what the trial court found, and 2) treating that as a binding promise to be upheld even by a succeeding DA is tantamount to granting the DA unconstitutional pardon powers, and 3) the usual remedy in instances of wrongfully compelled self-incrimination is a) for the defendant to invoke the Fifth to force the DA to clarify and b) to void evidence obtained as a result, not to void an entire trial and all other evidence. Read in this way, it's hard to see how the decision doesn't depend on the assumption of unconstitutional powers by the DA.
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@arraymac227 So you didn't read it? Ok.
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@arraymac227 So your definition of reading something covers not actually reading it. Amazing. Under my quirky definition, I actually had to sit down and read all 80 something pages.
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@vanessamaldonado5877 It could be, but then it would go to SCOTUS, who might not even accept the case (high profile; perhaps doesn't impinge enough on murky constitutional questions, etc.). On the bright side, I guess Fonald Rumsfeld died.
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@monopolizedopamine lol what
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