The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby’s 2018 sexual assault conviction on Wednesday, a dramatic development that prompted his immediate release from prison and upended the first high-profile celebrity conviction of the #MeToo era.
The divided court made no findings on the sufficiency of the evidence against the 83-year-old comedian.
Instead, it based its decision on a question that had bedeviled the case from the start: Whether a prior prosecutor’s decade-old promise that Cosby would never be charged with drugging and assaulting accuser Andrea Constand prohibited the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office from lodging a case in 2015.
Justice David N. Wecht, writing for the majority, found that it did, citing Cosby’s reliance on that vow when he agreed to give incriminating testimony in a civil case Constand had brought against him — testimony that the…
