After just three full days of discussions and one replacement, the Santa Monica panel this afternoon unveiled its decision against the much-accused creator of the Cosby Show. Delivered to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Carlan with plaintiff Judy Hutt, her legal team and Cosby’s defense team in the crowded courtroom, the 12-member jury also awarded Hut $ 500,000 in bail. Bill Cosby was not in court when the message was read. Claiming his right to the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, Cosby did not testify at the two-week trial, unlike Huth. A 2015 video footage of the actor was played in court and on jurors during the trial. With the 2018 conviction for sex crimes for raping Andrea Constand in 2004 that was evacuated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in June 2021, 84-year-old Cosby is almost certain to appeal against today’s verdict, sources tell me. The man once reverently called “America’s Daddy” sued for sexual acne and not just by Judy Houth in 2014. The plaintiff claimed that Cosby’s attack took place at the Playboy mansion in the mid-1970s, when she was a teenager. Huth initially claimed that the attack took place in 1974, when she was 15 years old, but later the plaintiff changed the date to 1975, when she was 16 years old. MORE PREVIOUS, 14:42: Bill Cosby could find out very soon if a jury in California decided he had sexually assaulted a minor. For the second time in less than a week, Santa Monica jurors have informed Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Carlan that they have reached a verdict in Judy Hutt’s political case against the man once known as “her dad.” Of America “. If all goes according to plan, the decision will be read in court within the next hour. Contrary to his criminal trials and the 2018 conviction that was now overturned for the rape of Andrea Constand in 2004, 84-year-old Cosby does not face a prison sentence in the Huth case. However, the embarrassed creator of the Cosby Show could end up paying millions in compensation if today’s verdict is convicted against him. Huth, who first sued Cosby in 2014 for sexual assault and two other allegations, claims the former jailed comedian attacked her at the Playboy Mansion in the mid-1970s when she was 16 years old. For years, a spokesman for the accused said this month, when the long overdue trial finally began, that “Mr. Cosby will be fully acquitted as soon as jurors hear the evidence, as well as consider Ms. Hutt’s many inconsistent reports.” “You have to decide what is right,” Huth’s lawyer Nathan Goldberg said in a counterclaim against jurors last week during the final hearings. “But keep in mind that you have to hold Mr. Cosby fully and fully responsible for what he did wrong.” Goldberg Allred’s partner, Maroko & Goldberg, Gloria Allred, was in court every day of the trial and during the jury hearings. Initially locating the date of the alleged incident as it occurred in 1974 and more recently shifting the time to 1975, an emotional Huth provided vivid details of the alleged sexual assault by Cosby during her deposition. While a Cosby absentee said he never met Huth and the actor’s legal team mocked her for changing the year of the incident, Houth’s lawyers provided photos of Cosby and Houth together taken by the latter’s girlfriend, Donna Samuelson. Faced with the fascinating testimony of both Huth and Samuelson, Cosby’s lawyers later assumed that the meeting between Huth and their client took place years later, when Huth was no longer a minor. Cosby’s lawyers also tried to trap Houth by claiming he had sold the photos to tabloids and others in the past for a large fee. Cosby did not testify at the trial. However, his videotaped testimony in 2015 was played out in the courtroom. Although her allegations of assault are statute-barred as criminal prosecution, Huth was able to sue Cosby under California’s statute of limitations if a defendant was abused as a minor and did not fully acknowledge what had happened until much earlier. In this spirit, the issue of reparations is partly what spread the jury and the process on Friday, when it first appeared that the verdict was close. After nearly two days of closed-door hearings, the 12-member jury returned to the courtroom late in the afternoon to announce that it had reached a decision on eight of the nine questions before them on the verdict. Indicating quite strongly that the verdict was against Cosby, the only question that remained unanswered by the jurors was whether the defendant acted with “malice, oppression or fraud”, so that Huth could be sentenced to punitive damages. There things became difficult and somewhat unprecedented, both judicially and substantively. From the start of the trial, Karlan was well aware that a juror had to leave the proceedings due to a previous engagement on June 20. The judge had promised to meet this deadline, which means that one deputy would sit with the other 11 jurors until Monday. It also means that the new jury “should start from scratch”, in the words of Karlan. In discussions that had already seen the jury return with many questions to the judge and some personal friction between two jurors, the resumption may not be as restarting as Karlan says it is: In a political case like this, a verdict is not required. be unanimous, with only nine of the 12 jurors having to agree for the verdict to be binding. So while the newly-appointed jury may have needed one or two beats to accelerate, things clearly moved fast enough. Adding to the jury drama, what made Friday’s closing minutes even more unusual was the fact that the partial verdict was rendered correctly as the Santa Monica Court was due to close on the weekend. Although Karlan thought, beyond the concerns expressed by Cosby’s team, accepting the partial verdict, time and money were not ultimately on his side. Hearing from a clerk that it was almost 4:30 p.m. PT, the judge risked costly overtime for his sheriff’s deputies who house the courthouse if he received the nearly completed verdict. Finally, he handed down the verdict this week. Earlier in the day, the jury appeared in a standstill with questions again about Cosby’s possible wickedness and possible punitive damages. Sentenced to up to 10 years in prison behind bars by a Pennsylvania judge in 2018 after a second trial for the rape of a former Temple University Constand employee, Cosby saw his sentence overturned in June 2021. After a series of The comedian and the revolving door of his lawyers, four of the seven judges of the Keystone State Supreme Court, ruled last summer that the then-announced Montgomery County DA Bruce Castor decision not to prosecute Cosby in 2005 after the investigation of Constand’s original claim had binding legal force. Immediately losing his sexual predator label, Cosby can not be tried again on the same charges. On March 7 this year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to reconsider the case, as requested by Montgomery DA Kevin Steele. This effectively ended the Constand case by revealing any new and remarkable circumstances. More than 60 women have claimed that Cosby drugged and assaulted them over the decades with a similar combination of pills and alcohol as used in Constand. Some of these women attended Cosby’s two criminal trials, the 2018 sentencing hearing and Houth’s trial last month. Huth’s allegations are the first sexual assault case against Cosby to reach trial.
