After comedian Bill Cosby’s sexual assault case ended in a mistrial, two jurors are speaking out about what went on during the more-than-52-hour deliberation.
Bobby Dugan, the youngest juror of the panel made up of seven men and five women, believes Cosby’s statements about his 2004 incident with Andrea Constand, led him right into a guilty verdict.
“When they were asking him would you use the word consent and he said himself he wouldn’t use that word — I was like, ‘You really just got caught red-handed,'” 21-year-old Dugan tells NBC News Monday, June 27. “Why would you say that if you were trying to defend yourself?”
Constand alleged Cosby drugged and molested her at his home in 2004. Two statements from Cosby were read during the trial, including one from Constand’s civil trial where the actor admitted he didn’t verbally ask for permission to touch the former Temple University employee after he gave her pills “to relax.” The other statement was from a 2005 police interview where Cosby said he didn’t remember “using the word consensual” while detailing his experience with Constand.
“I thought, ‘This is different,'” Dugan said when he opened his mind to Constand’s testimony, where she said she began to slur her words after taking the pills Cosby gave her and was “jolted awake” by him “groping my breasts under my shirt.”
“This wasn’t what I thought it was originally,” Dugan says.
An anonymous juror seemed to come to a different conclusion, however. Speaking to Pittburgh’s Channel 11, the juror didn’t share where he stood on the case, which he described as “hopelessly deadlocked” from the start but questioned Constand.
“That’s hard for me to believe, that I’ve been injured and it takes a year to report,” the juror says.
“The statute of limitations was running out,” the juror says. “I think they created this whole thing, a case that was settled in 2005 and we had to bring it up again in 2017.”
The juror said tension continued to rise among the jury, which at one point was 10-2 before two members decided to change their votes before it was presented to the Judge Steven O’Neill.
“The tears came toward the end,” the juror said of the panel being unable to reach a verdict on Cosby’s three counts of aggravated indecent assault. “It was so tense.”
Dugan corroborated that fact.
“Emotions are going to build up and sometimes you have to let them out, and that’s what people did,” he told NBC News.
Prosecutors plan to retry Cosby and Dugan agrees with the decision.
“Whether the verdict is guilty or not guilty, you need that final nail in the coffin,” he said.