Prosecutors had appealed a ruling by an appellate panel in Pennsylvania which had overturned the conviction on due process grounds.
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the bid by prosecutors in Pennsylvania to reinstate Bill Cosby’s criminal conviction for sexual assault.
In an order issued Monday, the court said that it had declined to hear the case filed by prosecutors last November.
The prosecutors had charged Mr. Cosby with sexual assault in connection with an encounter with Andrea Constand at his home outside Philadelphia in 2004 and he was convicted in 2018. The Supreme Court’s decision leaves in place a ruling by an appellate court in Pennsylvania earlier last year that overturned Mr. Cosby’s conviction on due process grounds.
In June, Mr. Cosby walked free after serving less than three years of a three-to-10-year prison sentence.
His release followed a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that Mr. Cosby’s rights had been violated when the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office pursued a criminal case against him despite what the appellate court found was a binding “non-prosecution agreement” given to him by a previous district attorney.
It was a dramatic reversal in one of the first high-profile criminal convictions of the #MeToo era.
The petition for review filed by the district attorney’s office challenged that decision, arguing that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had erred in its ruling.
A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, welcomed the move. “On behalf of Mr. and Mrs. Cosby and the Cosby family, we would like to offer our sincere gratitude to the justices of the United States Supreme Court for following the rules of law and protecting the Constitutional Rights of ALL American Citizens,” he said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office did not have an immediate comment.
