Bill Cosby was not lynched. Stop comparing him to Emmett Till.

Judge Joe Brown makes nonsensical argument

If you want to know what a lynching looks like, take a look at the photo of the dead body of Emmett Till.

Once you’ve done that, don’t ever compare what happens to a rich black dude in a 21st century courtroom to what happened to that black boy decades ago, especially when that rich black dude walks out of prison because a prosecutor screwed up, not because the rich black dude is actually innocent.

You’d think a man like Judge Joe Brown would know that. But he apparently doesn’t. He’s upset that people are upset that Bill Cosby is now a free man because the high court in Pennsylvania threw out his conviction. That court ruled that Cosby should have never been tried because a previous prosecutor agreed to not prosecute him if Cosby testified in a civil case. That’s why Cosby is free - not because he did nothing wrong, not because dozens of women are lying.

Brown is on solid ground while arguing that from a purely legal standpoint, the court’s ruling makes sense. If one prosecutor promises you won’t be prosecuted to entice you to tell the truth about what you did, a later prosecutor shouldn’t be able to use what you said to then prosecute you. I’m all for holding prosecutors to the highest standards.

But Brown went beyond that. In the interview with Mark Lamont Hill, he argued that means Cosby actually did nothing wrong, that he must be presumed innocent. That’s BS. We must ensure that the government has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s as it should be. That doesn’t mean outside of the courtroom we must pretend that men who do awful things didn’t do those awful things just because a prosecutor couldn’t get 12 people on a jury to agree or a high court to confirm.

Think about how nonsensical that is. If you watch a man kill a man in broad daylight, according to Brown’s reasoning, you can’t say that man is guilty or did anything wrong until a jury does. Beyond that, Brown and others are too quick to evoke the name Emmett Till in service of wealthy black dudes who do awful things. It is pretty much the worst example possible.

The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi

Till wasn’t helped by due process - his killers were. An all-white jury quickly found them not guilty, and the men later confessed to a magazine about what they did, and got paid for the confession knowing legal due process meant they could not be charged for that crime again. According to Brown’s nonsensical reasoning, we should not consider those men guilty.

Cosby is not a victim. He’s a man who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual assault. And though it can be reasonably argued that what he said in that civil deposition should not have been used in a criminal case, there’s no reason for us to ignore Cosby’s admission that he knowingly bought drugs to have sex with women even while claiming it was always consensual. We must be able to hold two thoughts in our heads at once, that the government must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt AND no matter what happens inside the courtroom the rest of us can still use our common sense when thinking these cases through.

I don’t believe in mob rule. I believe in due process. But I know due process sometimes protects killers and makes justice for victims harder, as seemed to happen in this case.