Court Jesting

The law is a funny thing. This week, a clearly guilty man was set free, as he should have been, and the Supreme Court decided two cases using completely opposite reasoning in order to allow themselves to come to the conclusions they wanted to – both of them bad.

The freed guilty man is, of course, that comedian, actor, doctor-of-education, and rapist – William Cosby. It seems that a few years ago, when Cos was facing a civil suit for rape, the DA promised him that if he gave a deposition in that suit, he would not be prosecuted.  There is some question about whether this promise was ever made. There is no record of it and the DA who says he made it is the same guy who represented Trump in his second impeachment and gave that rambling incoherent presentation that was condemned by everyone, including his client.

Anyway, based on that supposed promise, Cos gave the deposition, and in it he admitted to much of what the victim claimed that he had done.  Flash forward a few years and another DA decided that he was going to prosecute Dr. Huxtable anyway for the same conduct against the same victim. In the trial, the admission in the deposition was critical in his being found guilty.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has now said, “Hey, hey hey, that’s a no-no-no. Immunity isn’t like a dish of Jello Pudding Pop. You can’t give it and then just snatch it away. The penalty for this rights violation is that Coz gets to walk. 

So, the law says that an admitted rapist must go free because his rights were trampled on.  And that is as it should be. It is easy enough for prosecutors to get guilty verdicts when they follow the rules. About 90% of all federal defendants are found guilty, as are 75% of the defendants in the country’s most populous counties. If we let prosecutors break the rules, none of us are free. The Cosby case is a victory for the rule of law.

On the other hand, we have the Supreme Court, the place where the rule of law should be paramount. This week, it wasn’t. 

In a case about whether Georgia could pass laws that made it more difficult to vote, a majority of the Justices twisted itself into declaring that those restrictions weren’t all that bad, that the rights of those voters weren’t really violated and that the restrictions could remain.  Then something must have happened to those Justices when they came to decide whether donors to charities in California would have to disclose who they were.  Oh, my God, that, they said, as opposed to the benign act of denying voting rights, was a terrible imposition. How dare California force people to do such a thing! That “rule of law” had to go.

Was it just coincidence that the result of both cases favored conservative political thought? Were the Justices blind to that fact?  If you think so, I have tickets to a Cosby concert to sell you.

The law is a funny thing.