Cosby’s Lawyers and Wife Seek Judge’s Recusal Before Sentencing

PHILADELPHIA — Just two weeks before Bill Cosby’s sentencing, his wife and his defense team on Tuesday asked Judge Steven T. O’Neill, who has presided over the sexual assault case, to recuse himself, arguing that he had failed to disclose a bitter feud with a key witness in the case.

Cosby faces up to 30 years in prison after being convicted in April of assaulting Andrea Constand, a former Temple University staff member, at his home near Philadelphia in 2004. He was convicted in a retrial after the jurors in the first court proceeding, in 2017, failed to reach a verdict.

The Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, who prosecuted the case, dismissed the defense motion as a “desperate, eleventh-hour attempt” to stop the sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 24-25.

The witness, a former district attorney, Bruce Castor, testified at a pretrial hearing in 2016 that he had decided years earlier not to prosecute Cosby because he believed there was not enough evidence. He said he promised Cosby at the time that the office would not pursue such a case so as to induce him to testify in a civil case brought by Constand. Cosby ultimately paid a $3.4 million settlement in that case.

But O’Neill let the Cosby criminal case proceed after finding that current prosecutors were not bound by Castor’s decision, in part because the only written evidence of such an agreement was a news release Castor had issued in 2005. O’Neill also ruled that Castor lacked credibility.

Now Cosby’s lawyers are arguing that O’Neill should have disclosed what they described as a “nasty” personal conflict with Castor that, they say, could have affected his impartiality. In the court papers, the Cosby team tracks the conflict back to a campaign two decades ago when both men were vying for the Republican nomination for Montgomery County district attorney.

Castor was then a top deputy in the district attorney’s office and O’Neill was in private practice. The Cosby team said Castor had ordered a woman who worked in the office — and whom O’Neill had dated when he was separated from his wife — to show up at a campaign debate in an apparent attempt to “rattle or distract” O’Neill.

In the filing, Cosby’s lawyer, Joseph P. Green, says that O’Neill later angrily confronted Castor and that the relationship between the two men “became increasingly acrimonious, and has remained so to this date.”

The conflict “would cause any reasonable person, including any reasonable judge, and a significant minority of the lay community, to conclude that the court could not possibly be impartial regarding Mr. Castor’s credibility,” the motion said.

The Cosby team is asking that the judge vacate his February 2016 ruling, in which he rejected a defense motion to dismiss charges against Cosby, and remove himself from any further proceedings in the case.

Last week prosecutors asked O’Neill to allow several other accusers to join Constand in testifying at the sentencing hearing to present their accounts of having been sexually abused by Cosby.

The Cosby team is looking to block such testimony and argued Tuesday that the judge should recuse himself on the additional grounds that he is more likely to believe “disputed claims of abuse,” because his wife works as a sexual abuse counselor at the University of Pennsylvania. In March, the judge denied a similar defense request, saying his wife’s beliefs and professional activities “do not influence me one iota.”

As the court motion was filed, Cosby’s wife, Camille, issued a statement calling on the judge to disclose the history of his relationship with Castor. “That this judge,” she said, “would hide his bias and decide that his rival, the former DA, could not be trusted to give truthful testimony, shows that the judge let his own personal feelings override Mr. Cosby’s right to a fair trial.” She also released a statement in April, after the jury verdict, accusing the judge of “arrogantly collaborating” with prosecutors.

Lynne Abraham, a lawyer and former Philadelphia district attorney, called the motion a “Hail Mary pass” that was not based on any legal theory that the judge had acted imprudently. Alan Tauber, a Philadelphia defense attorney, predicted the judge would say he did not bear a grudge and “held no animosity” regarding Castor’s campaign actions.

Castor, now in private practice, did not respond to requests for comment. Stacey Witalec, a spokeswoman for the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, said it was unlikely that court administrators would comment on behalf of O’Neill.