The judge in Bill Cosby’s retrial rejected demands Thursday from the comedian’s attorneys to step aside during a hearing in which they made clear they plan to attack his accuser as a greedy liar who falsely accused the comedian of sexually assaulting her to collect a payoff. 

Judge Steven O’Neill shot down what amounted to a last-ditch effort to postpone the trial by attorneys who lost their bid to overturn his ruling allowing up to five additional accusers to testify against Cosby.

Lawyers argued he should remove himself because his wife is a social worker and advocate for assault victims, pointing to a $100 donation made in her name to an organization that gave money to a group planning a protest outside the retrial.

O’Neill said that was made 13 months ago by the department where his wife works at the University of Pennsylvania and that he’s “not biased or prejudiced” by her work.

Jury selection starts April 2

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday as the 80-year-old Cosby faces charges that he drugged and molested former Temple University athletics administrator Andrea Constand at his home in 2004. 

While they sparred with the judge in court Thursday, Cosby’s attorneys are also counting on him to make critical rulings to bolster their defense that Constand is a money-grubbing liar.

They want O’Neill to let them call Marguerite Jackson, a woman who says Constand spoke of framing a celebrity before she went to police with allegations that Cosby drugged and molested her in 2004. They also want to let jurors know how much Cosby paid her in a 2006 civil settlement.

“Those are the bookends: I have a motive and I have a payoff,” attorney Kathleen Bliss argued. “The jury should be allowed to view the full context of that.”

Assistant District Attorney Kristen Fedden said that they doubted the discussion with Jackson happened.

O’Neill blocked Jackson from testifying at the first trial because he said her testimony would be hearsay. Prosecutors want him to do the same for the retrial.

Prosecutors say the theory that Constand wanted to set up Cosby is undermined by the comedian’s testimony in a 2005 deposition that she only visited his home when invited and that he gave her pills without her asking for them.

Prosecutors also argued the settlement is irrelevant to the criminal case, but that if it is allowed in, jurors should also hear about negotiations that led to the settlement.

Assistant District Attorney Stewart Ryan contended that Cosby’s negotiators initially asked that he be released from any criminal liability and tried to bar Constand from cooperating with law enforcement. He said that amounted to obstruction of justice.

“Those things are inconsistent with a person who believes he’s innocent,” Ryan said.

Judge’s wife

Thursday’s hearing started with arguments over the judge’s wife, Deborah O’Neill, a psychotherapist who coordinates a team that cares and advocates for student sexual assault victims. 

O’Neill said that the donation cited by Cosby’s lawyers didn’t involve her money or their joint assets.

“How are my wife’s independent views of an independent woman connected to me?” O’Neill said. “She’s an independent woman and has the right to be involved in anything that she believes in.”

O’Neill said Thursday that Cosby’s former attorneys raised the prospect of having him step aside in December 2016, but never followed through. He added that he could have rejected the recusal request simply because Cosby’s attorneys waited too long to ask.

He said they were aware of Deborah O’Neill’s work as far back as December 2016, but that they waited until getting several adverse rulings just before retrial to raise it as an issue.

O’Neill spoke glowingly about his wife and said it was difficult to have her accomplishments “trivialized” in a legal motion. He said Cosby’s attorneys had presented an antiquated view of marriage in which spouses must agree on everything.

Cosby’s attorneys could still appeal O’Neill’s decision to allow the other accusers to testify to the state’s Supreme Court.

Constand phone call

The pretrial hearing will continue Friday, including for arguments over whether jurors can hear about a 2005 phone call in which Constand says she told her mother about the alleged assault for the first time.

O’Neill agreed Thursday that the trial wouldn’t start until at least April 9 and that the jury chosen from suburban Montgomery County would be sequestered in a local hotel.

The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.
…

It looks like “Game Over” for actress Lindsay Lohan in her state court fight against a software company for using what she claims is a likeness of her in a video game.

Lohan’s lawyer argued before New York’s top court that Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. violated her right to privacy by incorporating “look-a-like” images of her in the game “Grand Theft Auto V.”

But the state Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the satirical representations of “a modern, beach-going” young woman are not identifiable as Lohan. The court affirmed a ruling from a lower state appeals court dismissing her lawsuit.

Similar claims against Take-Two by “Mob Wives” television star Karen Gravano also were dismissed in a separate ruling.

A message left with Lohan’s lawyer wasn’t immediately returned.
…

Kentucky has altered a statue of Jefferson Davis in the state Capitol, removing a plaque that declared the only president of the Confederacy to be a patriot and a hero.

The plaque adorned a 15-foot (4.5 meter) marble statue, which sits in a corner of the state’s ornate Capitol rotunda just behind a bronze statue of former President Abraham Lincoln. Both men were born in Kentucky.

Advocates have pushed for the Davis statue to be removed from the Capitol for years. Their protests gained momentum following the racially-motivated 2015 murders of nine people at an African-American church in South Carolina and the violent protests last year at a white supremacist rally in Virginia.

The Historic Properties Advisory Commission, which governs the statues in the rotunda, voted in 2015 to keep the statue in place as a symbol of the state’s divided past. Kentucky never joined the Confederacy, but it had a number of Confederate sympathizers who attempted to set up a Confederate government in the western part of the state during the Civil War.

Last year, the commission voted to alter the statue by removing a plaque that says Davis was a “Patriot-Hero-Statesman.” The commission then delayed that decision so a lawyer from Republican Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration could make sure the commission had authority to remove the plaque.

Officials removed the plaque on March 11, according to Leslie Nigels, director of the Division of Historic Properties. A report from Nigels during the commission’s meeting on Thursday said removing the plaque is consistent with the commission’s obligation to provide “an objective, balanced, and educational display.”

The Lincoln statute was erected in 1911. The Davis statute came in 1936 after a fundraising campaign by the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the height of the Jim Crow era, when segregation laws proliferated throughout the South.

The original plan, according to the Kentucky Historical Society, was for the Lincoln statue to face north while the Davis statue faced South. The plan was abandoned because the statues were too heavy to be that close together.

The plaque in question was installed in 1975. It was a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and former Gov. A.B. “Happy” Chandler was on hand to dedicate it.
…

She’s talked shop with President Barack Obama and is soon to be the subject of a feature documentary. Mai Khoi, an outspoken musician who has become a thorn in the side of the Vietnamese government, was detained Tuesday after refusing to shut up about human rights amidst a widening crackdown on dissent in the country. David Boyle reports from Hanoi.
…

There are fewer than 2,000 wild pandas in the world. However, as VOA’s David Byrd reports, a new documentary tells how scientists are working to introduce captive-bred panda cubs into the wild.
…

Sean Penn, Oscar-winning actor, has other passions these days.

“I’m not in love with the job of acting anymore,” says Penn, whose films include “Milk,” “Mystic River,” “Dead Man Walking” and many others. “In fact, what I want to do is write books.”

Penn fears the world is so overwhelmed with “content” that even great movies are quickly forgotten. But he still believes in words. This week, Penn joins such literary heroes as Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, not to mention such acting peers as Ethan Hawke and James Franco, as an author of fiction.

Penn’s novel is called “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff,” a title not out of place for someone whose off-screen adventures have led to encounters with everyone from Mikhail Gorbachev to El Chapo. “Bob Honey,” its volatile and alienated protagonist like/unlike the writer himself, is a hot tour of the United States and beyond as a Trump-like figure known as “The Landlord” rises to power and Bob Honey longs to be “Unbranded, unbridled and free.”

“Bob Honey” has an improvisational style and a trail of alliterations (“Quite intentionally, to a fault,” Penn acknowledges). The plot involves septic tanks, lethal mallets and fireworks for dictators. The book’s back story also follows a scattered path. Last year, Penn released a brief audiobook under the pseudonym Pappy Pariah. He expanded on it and published a hardcover under his own name, although he says that opinions contained within, including a poem that chastises the #MeToo movement, are not necessarily his own.

“A character’s thought pattern,” he says of such lines as “A platform for accusation impunity?/Due process has lost its sheen?”

During a recent interview with The Associated Press, the 57-year-old Penn talked about writing, movies, #MeToo and his changing tastes in books. He has more trouble in mind for Bob Honey, depending on whether he thinks the public will care. Some reviews have been rough (“Sean Penn The Novelist Must Be Stopped” reads a Huffington Post headline), but the novel has made the top 100 on Amazon.com and hit No. 1 in a category Penn should appreciate: absurdist fiction.

On why he wrote the novel:

“I needed to step away from the news cycle some time during 2015-2016. It was occurring to me more and more that the debates I had found even myself part of in the public arena had become that which were dividing us as a country more and more, that we entered the conversations now as 3-year-olds and to be in the conversation was to be a 3-year-old. The only way I felt I could respond to it was a kind of satire — to choose to laugh, instead of vent, or instead of rage.”

On some favorite authors from Mailer to Cormac McCarthy and what they have in common:

“I realized after I wrote this book that my reading of fiction has been, and I hadn’t thought about it before, almost entirely mono-cultural. It’s almost been entirely American men, the authors I have read. I’m anxious to change that. … My real history of going to bookstores and buying a book has been the rugged men tale tellers and I find that my interests do go beyond that.”

 “I was early on a reader of Louise Erdrich, but I haven’t read any of her writing in a long time. I’d like to go back and see what she’s been doing. I’m a big fan of Sharon Olds as a poet. Whenever she has a book out, I grab it.”

 

On #Metoo:

“One of the interesting things that I note has not come up in the discussion of sexual abuse, be it by a partner or a parent or a legal system, and it’s sort of surprising that there isn’t within any of these movements any express concern or dialogue when it comes to the age consent in this country.”

“Here we are talking about sexual abuse and you’re still seeing in this country teenagers being married. I think for a movement about protecting young people, about protecting women, that if we are to add to our empathy those who were exploited for their ambition, among the other things, which is not my business to say that that’s a fair thing to be protected from or not. The expectation for me in my adulthood was that I was responsible for that. We are all different and people have different strengths and weaknesses at different times in their lives. But when we’re talking about kids, it’s just clear.”

On a possible movie of `Bob Honey’:

“A couple of people have talked to me about that. I think that if one of these talented directors really wants to do it, then it would be a lot of fun to see them go do it. But I don’t want anything to do with it other than pay whatever it is to buy a ticket and see it.”
…

Prosecutors in the Minnesota county where Prince died have agreed to share investigative files with attorneys for the musician’s family under strict guidelines.

Carver County Attorney Mark Metz says Prince’s death investigation remains active, so the data is confidential. But family attorneys may view it to determine whether to file a lawsuit in Illinois before a two-year statute of limitations expires.

 

Prince’s plane stopped in Moline, Illinois, when he became ill from a suspected drug overdose days before his death. He died April 21, 2016.

 

A judge’s order says attorneys must view the data at the sheriff’s office only. It must not be copied, shared or openly discussed.

 

Investigative data becomes public in Minnesota after a case is resolved, or if no charges are filed. Metz said he plans to make a charging decision in the near future.

 

 
…