Bill Cosby’s retrial on sexual assault charges will be delayed until next year as his new legal team gets up to speed on the case, which pits the 80-year-old comedian against a woman who says he drugged and molested her more than a decade ago.
Judge Steven O’Neill on Tuesday granted a defence request to postpone the retrial, which had been scheduled to start in November, saying there’s no way that Cosby’s lawyers would be ready by then.
“To ask someone to review the voluminous record over 18 months — now 20 months in this case — simply cannot be done,” O’Neill said from the bench.
Cosby’s new lawyers made their first court appearance on behalf of The Cosby Show star, who’s charged with knocking out accuser Andrea Constand with pills and sexually assaulting her at his home near Philadelphia in 2004. He says Constand, a former executive with Temple University’s women’s basketball programme, consented to their sexual encounter.
His first trial ended without a verdict after the jury deadlocked, setting the stage for a retrial.
The judge on Tuesday asked Cosby’s lawyers to consider a start date sometime between March 15 and April 1.
