No. The definition you quoted says innocent means someone isn’t guilty. It says nothing at all about conviction.
We know from the information given that Cosby did in fact commit the crime. There was enough information to convict. We have reason to believe he committed this crime numerous times. And he was found civilly liable in at least one case.
Thus Cosby is not innocent by the definition you offered. If you’re using a legal definition, as others suppose, I think it would be better to say something like “He may be factually guilty, but legally he’s considered ‘innocent’.”
I myself am wary of the fact that this was rejected with prejudice, and am not sure that an informal agreement should count in these cases. It seems to me that, at the very least, there should be a retrial without the improperly obtained evidence.
Because of that, I am okay with the term “technicality,” even with the negative connotations. That said, I’m also fine with “procedural error” if that will ruffle fewer feathers.
However, I think it’s important, for the sake of justice, to note that there was indeed enough evidence for him to have been found guilty.
I will refrain from my usual arguments about whether or not the way our legal system works is the best way to handle this sort of error unless it becomes a wider topic in this thread. I will say that, to someone not part of the legal system, it does seem absurd that we know that he factually committed the crime in question but are legally required to let him go.
In a certain sense, yes. He was tricked into admitting to the rape when he should have known he could keep silent.
Had he voluntarily confessed to the crime after being fully informed that he didn’t have to confess and what the consequences of confessing would be, it would be different. That could stand.
If I read the opinion correctly, the propriety of that testimony went up on appeal too, but the court did not have to reach that question because it found for Cosby on the other issue.
Not quite, I think. I’m fairly sure he never admitted to raping her per se - he claimed it was a consensual encounter. But he did admit to giving her illegal quaaludes and to having had sex with plenty of other young women over the decades, frequently plying them with quaaludes. This, along with testimony of other accusers, helped establish his general pattern of behavior.
There’s been a lot of illuminating discussion in this thread regarding the Fifth Amendment issues raised by the previous DA’s actions and how Cosby’s right against self-incrimination may have been violated. Is this really all you’ve gotten from this thread?
This was the second issue at appeal, the one the Court never considered since it set aside his conviction on the self incrimination issue. Whether it was prejudicial to permit the other women to testify since they related to use of drugs for consensual encounters, (ie he gave them drugs told them what they were and had sex with them).
This has been my complaint, and really shock when I became a lawyer. My understanding was that a person was to be tried on what he did in this case, not what he did before.
So if we have Jimmy the Shoplifter, it doesn’t matter if he shoplifted 30 times in the past. We shouldn’t use that evidence because Jimmy won’t get a fair trial in this instance if the jury hears about those 30 priors.
This is commonly called “404(b)” evidence by the rule it refers to, but with recent conservative judges, it has been turned on its head. With all of the exceptions, juries do convict based on this evidence, even though they are given a confusing instruction not to do such a thing.
I thought it might be amusing to name an non-existent Constitutional Amendment in my hypothetical (since the specific amendment wasn’t important) . I considered saying something like 31st amendment, but I didn’t want to force some folks to look up the number of passed Amendments at Wikipedia (A: 27, involving Congressional Pay Raises, which was passed in 1992). I was trying to provide a range of alternatives to “Get off on a technicality”. Maybe I should have said, 21st amendment considerations (which brought back booze).
Salmon Rushdie once wrote a children’s book that referenced a P2C2E, or a “Process too complicated to explain.” That’s basically what a technicality is in this instance, and it too often reflects laziness, dim wit, or indifference to criminal procedure.
It’s really no different to any other system where for the overall system to remain productive, it is necessary for certain counterproductive things to happen. It’s immensely frustrating in respect of any given instance, but ultimately pretty simple conceptually.
We factually don’t know shit. We know that he used Ludes to drug women in the 70s which (for some reason) was semi-acceptable at the time. But we don’t know that because he did that he didn’t reform his behavior in the early 2000s. Remember that one jury could not reach a verdict until the other stuff was brought out.
That’s my POV. It sounds like it was right to release him, and perhaps he shouldn’t even have been prosecuted at all, despite it being overwhelmingly likely that he was a rapist.
Still, the prosecutor deciding to skirt the edges like that means that we all know the facts, and most people now know he was a rapist, and he’ll go down in history as a rapist. In some ways it’s the best outcome the prosecutor could have got.