Corrected...

  

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby’s 2018 sexual assault conviction on Wednesday and barred him from being retried, a decision that will pave the way for his release from prison and upend the first high-profile celebrity conviction of the #MeToo era.

The divided court ruled that the 83-year-old comedian — who has served more than two years of a three-to-10-year sentence — had been denied a fair trial, citing an agreement struck with a previous prosecutor that the justices said barred Cosby from ever being charged with the 2004 assault of Temple University employee Andrea Constand.

Justice David N. Wecht, writing for the majority, said Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele was legally bound by that decade-old promise and therefore should not have brought charges when new evidence surfaced in 2015.

Vacating Cosby’s conviction, Wecht said, “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.”