The Pennsylvania Parole Board has denied parole to 83-year-old actor and comedian Bill Cosby, citing his refusal to participate in the state’s Sexually Violent Predator courses designed to rehabilitate the participants.
The Board wrote that their decision was based on his “need to participate in and complete additional institutional programs, the negative recommendation made by the department of corrections, [his] failure to develop a parole release plan.”
Cosby has publicly stated that to join the program would be tantamount to an admission of guilt. He has already served three years of his three to ten-year sentence in 2018 after being convicted on charges of aggravated indecent assault involving the drugging and molestation of Andrea Constand in 2004.
Cosby’s spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, stated, “It was brought to our attention by Mr. Cosby that over the past months, members of the PA State Parole Board had met with him and emphatically stated, ‘If he did not participate in SVP (Sexually Violent Predator) courses that his parole would be denied.’ Mr. Cosby has vehemently proclaimed his innocence and continues to deny all allegations made against him as being false, without the sheer evidence or any proof,” according to the Daily Mail.
Wyatt added, “He remains hopeful that the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court will issue an opinion to vacate his conviction or warrant him a new trial.”
Cosby said in November 2019 that he would not be released before he served his full sentence because “they’re not going to hear me say that I have remorse.”
The Daily Wire reported in November 2019:
“I have eight years and nine months left,” Cosby told National Newspaper Publishers Association’s BlackPressUSA.com in a phone interview published Sunday. “When I come up for parole, they’re not going to hear me say that I have remorse. I was there. I don’t care what group of people come along and talk about this when they weren’t there. They don’t know.”
The ruling against him, the comedian told NNPA’s Stacey M. Brown, was all a “set-up” and the jury rigged.
“It’s all a set up. That whole jury thing. They were imposters,” he said. As alleged evidence, Cosby pointed to “the woman who blew the whistle,” the potential juror who said she overheard another juror declare before the trial began that “he’s guilty.”
“Then she went in and came out smiling, it’s something attorneys will tell you is called a payoff,” he said. “I know what they’ve done to my people. But my people are going to view me and say, ‘that boy looks good. That boy is strong.’ I have too many heroes that I’ve sat with. Too many heroes whom I listened to like John Henrik Clarke, Kenneth Clark, and Dorothy Height. Those people are very strong, and they saw the rejection of their people. This is political. I can see the whole thing.”
Cosby’s attorneys have contended that a prior deposition given by Cosby during a civil suit brought by Constand was inadmissible because he had been promised immunity from criminal prosecution.