Bill Cosby's sex assault conviction goes before Pennsylvania's highest court - Fox News

Pennsylvania's highest court questioned Tuesday whether Bill Cosby's alleged history of intoxicating and sexually assaulting young women amounted to a signature crime pattern, given studies that show as many as half of all sexual assaults involve drugs or alcohol.

Cosby, 83, hopes to overturn his 2018 sex assault conviction because the judge let prosecutors call five other accusers who said Cosby mistreated them the same way he did his victim, Andrea Constand.

“That conduct you describe — the steps, the young women — there’s literature that says that’s common to 50% of these assaults — thousands of assaults — nationwide,” Chief Justice Thomas G.

BILL COSBY'S NEW MUGSHOT TRENDS ON SOCIAL MEDIA AS HE APPEARS TO BE SMILING.

25, 2018: Bill Cosby arrives for a sentencing hearing following his sexual assault conviction at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown Pa.

Courts have long wrestled with decisions about when other accusers should be allowed to testify in criminal cases.

O'Neill had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosby's first trial in 2017, when the jury could not reach a verdict.

O'Neill then let five other accusers testify at Cosby's retrial in 2018, when the jury convicted him of drugging and sexually assaulting Constand.

BILL COSBY'S APPEAL COULD DICTATE HOW TRIALS IN THE #METOO ERA ARE CONDUCTED GOING FORWARD.

Criminal law professor Laurie Levenson believes it's important for the court to scrutinize Cosby's conviction given the publicity the case attracted, the legal questions it raised and the potential influence of the #MeToo movement.

However, she was less sure there's data to show that intoxication was as prevalent in sex assault cases in the 1980s through 2004 as it is today.

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