Bill Cosby Released From Prison After Court Quashes Sex Crime Conviction

• Bill Cosby was sentenced in September 2018 to three to 10 years in state prison for allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand in 2004

Bill Cosby was released from prison on Wednesday after his conviction on sexual assault charges was overturned by Pennsylvania’s highest court.

The 83-year-old Cosby walked out of the State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Wednesday afternoon, officials told ABC News.

Cosby’s publicist, Andrew Wyatt, told ABC News earlier Wednesday that he was going to pick Cosby up at the prison.

Aerial footage from Philadelphia ABC station WPVI showed Bill Cosby getting out of a car at his Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, mansion wearing a maroon T-shirt and baggy trousers. He flashed a peace sign as people helped him walk into his home.

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Cosby later emerged from his home and walked to the end of his driveway where he stood with Wyatt and his lawyers as they addressed the media. Cosby smiled as reporters asked him to respond to no longer being incarcerated, but he declined to speak.

“What we saw today was justice, justice for all Americans,” Wyatt said.

The actor released a statement on Twitter, writing, “I have never changed my stance nor my story. I have always maintained my innocence. Thank you to all my fans, supporters and friends who stood by me through this ordeal. Special thanks to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for upholding the rule of law.”

One of Cosby’s appellate attorneys, Jennifer Bonjean, said she and the rest of Cosby’s legal team were “thrilled” to have him home.

“He served three years of an unjust sentence. He did it with dignity, principle and he was a mentor to other inmates,” Bonjean said. “He was really, as I say, doing the time. The time was not doing him.”

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She also thanked the state Supreme Court for demonstrating “they were impervious to the court of public opinion, which frankly the lower courts were not.”

In a swift reaction to his release, Constand and her lawyers in a statement, said, “Today’s majority decision regarding Bill Cosby is not only disappointing but of concern in that it may discourage those who seek justice for sexual assault in the criminal justice system from reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant or may force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action.”