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OPINION

Mad, #MeToo Matriarchy Ensnared Bill Cosby

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File

“The matriarchy is merciless, and it has thoroughly feminized and twisted US law,” this writer wrote, in April of 2018, upon the sentencing and jailing of comedian Bill Cosby.

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Cosby had been found “guilty” “of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in a Philadelphia suburb in 2004.” 

CNN gloated at the prospects of the legendary 83-year-old comedian facing up to 10 years in prison. The network, under whose auspices are gathered some of the most malevolent and moronic activist broadcasters, in an already crooked media-industrial-complex—did not feature one dissenting legal opinion. 

Actually, with few exceptions, talking heads, right and left, converged on Cosby. So, while decent logic and law came from Townhall.com’s Marina Medvin, Kimberly Guilfoyle on Fox News joined the #MeToo mob in raising her pom-poms for this travesty of a verdict.

Those of us who did dissent at the time are thrilled that Pennsylvania’s highest court has vacated Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction, after Cosby had served two years of a three-to-ten-year sentence. 

The same myopic, malfunctioning media are currently choosing to focus on how the Cosby verdict has been overturned on a procedural or technical matter. A prosecutor, Pennsylvania Republican Bruce Castor, had struck a “non-prosecution agreement” with Mr. Cosby in 2005. Lack of admissible evidence notwithstanding, this prior agreement with Castor barred the case from going to trial.

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Now, as the Guardian explains, Philadelphia justices ruled that Cosby relied on the promise that he would not be prosecuted, when he agreed to testify in a civil case brought against him by [accuser] Andrea Constand, without invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Enter District Attorney Kevin Steele. He must have been watching too many episodes of the new, #MeToo “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” where a team helmed by vengeful protagonist Olivia Benson traps men by means fair and foul. Too often, plea bargains and other agreements are struck only to be gleefully and maliciously torn up once the suspect is deceived into compliance, having trusted the integrity of “the system.”  

Matters were certainly rendered unclean when, by deception, officers of the law got Cosby to forfeit his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Once Cosby had done that, in good faith, DA Steele charged Cosby in 2015, using precisely the compromising deposition Cosby was enticed to give in the civil law suit. 

But don’t allow the due-process oversight, indubitably important, to distract you from the nub of the matter.  

The Cosby prosecution, as I pointed out at the time, rested on he-said, she-said hearsay evidence, on facts that can’t possibly meet the rules of evidence (the ones the United States once abided), or be corroborated for the purposes of a just prosecution, in accordance with the legal standards of Western law (of blessed memory). 

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The tainted evidence was solicited decades too late, with utter disregard for the statute of limitations. It came from unverified “prior bad act” women (“witnesses”)–unhinged #MeToo hysterics loosed in a court of law–who acted and sounded as though they were demented. Why, even the date of “the crime” could not be established. 

The Law must engage in a search for truth. Ultimately, however, courts of law do not deal with what happened. Their judgments must rely on what can be proven to have happened.  

Prosecutorial power to bring charges against a person is an awesome power, stress Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton in The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Backing him, the prosecutor has the might of the state, and, consequently, he must never “override the rights of the defendant in order to gain a conviction.”

Prosecutorial duties are dual. While acting as the plaintiff, the prosecutor must also take pains to protect the defendant’s rights. 

This is why the #MeToo judicial “philosophy” undergirding the prosecution of Bill Cosby and many other men is so terrifying. 

"Always Believe the Victim" is a ditzy, made-in-Hollywood dogma that goes against the stellar Anglo-American common law legal tradition.  

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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook and throttled by Twitter.

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