An affront to fundamental fairness.

Bill Cosby, etc.

I didn’t want to write about something heavy this week, but the Pennsylvania Court overturning Bill Cosby’s conviction sort of forced my hand. When I read something like this story, my brain goes a number of directions:

1. Anger.

2. What good comes from locking up a guy in his eighties?

3. If it wasn’t Cosby, I probably would not be as angry at the statement that the Pennsylvania DA was “obligated to stand by his predecessor’s promise not to charge Cosby. There was no evidence that promise was ever put in writing.”

4. But it is, so….

5. Wait, the judge called Cosby’s conviction “an affront to fundamental fairness”?

6. Anger.…

You can believe both that the American prison system is so bad that probably… nobody… should be in it, certainly nobody in their eighties, and also that something like this is a deliberate insult to the idea that what Cosby did is a crime or even wrong—this is roughly, I guess, the BDM take—but it doesn’t leave you much of a place to go. Everything I believe is paralyzing. Is this being …