Bill Cosby released from Pennsylvania prison after sex assault case thrown out
State court justices vacated case over agreement to not prosecute, tainted testimony
Bill Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his sexual assault conviction.
Cosby, 83, was released from SCI Phoenix in Collegeville, Pa., outside Philadelphia, just before 2:30 p.m, state corrections officials told Fox News.
He was seen leaving the prison in a white car shortly afterward.
The disgraced actor, once known as “America’s Dad,” had served more than two years of his three-to-10-year sentence after he was convicted of drugging and molesting a woman at his Cheltenham, Pa. home in 2004.
The state’s highest court threw out the disgraced actor’s conviction earlier Wednesday after finding that District Attorney Kevin Steele, the prosecutor who brought the case against Cosby, violated an agreement to not charge him that previous District Attorney Bruce Castor had made in 2005, though the deal had apparently never been put in writing.
BILL COSBY’S SEX ASSAULT CONVICTION OVERTURNED BY PENNSYLVANIA COURT
The majority of the split justices wrote in their 79-page opinion that Cosby had been counting on that agreement when he gave testimony in a civil case filed by Andrea Constand, whose accusations also later formed the basis of the criminal case against Cosby.
The justices also found that testimony from five other women who accused Cosby of assaulting them in the 1980s tainted the trial and that those other accusers should not have been allowed to testify.
The actor best known for “The Cosby Show” maintained his innocence and had previously said he’d serve the full sentence rather than admit any guilt over the encounter with Constand.
Cosby spent his time behind bars at SCI Phoenix, a 3,830-bed, maximum-security state prison that opened in 2018.
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In a 2019 interview with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Cosby called his cell a “penthouse” and said he was speaking to other inmates as part of a program called Mann Up to help them reform.
“I don’t belong to the Mann Up Association, but it’s a privilege to come in and speak,” he told a reporter at the time. “I never wanted them to lord me up. This is a great privilege.”
Fox News’ Sasha Savitsky and the Associated Press contributed to this report.