Bill Cosby's new lawyers get his sex-assault retrial postponed to 2018

Bill Cosby's new celebrity legal team is already having an effect: His second trial on sexual-assault charges will be postponed until sometime next spring.

Cosby's motion for a delay in his retrial was heard Tuesday by Judge Steven O'Neill at a pre-trial hearing to deal with issues in advance of his second trial, which had been scheduled to start in Norristown, Pa., outside Philadelphia on Nov. 6.

O'Neill said at the hearing he would tentatively set a new trial date for mid-March or early April 2018. 

The hearing was the first appearance of Cosby's new team of defense lawyers, led by high-profile California lawyer Tom Mesereau, the defense attorney who won an acquittal for Michael Jackson on multiple child-molestation charges in a California trial in 2005.

Cosby, 80, announced he had hired the new team on Monday. It's not unusual for new lawyers in a criminal case to seek a delay in a trial in order to get up to speed on the case. 

"To ask someone to review the voluminous record over 18 months — now 20 months in this case — simply cannot be done," O'Neill said from the bench.

Cosby's original legal team of Brian McMonagle of Philadelphia and Angela Agrusa of Los Angeles sought and received permission from O'Neill to withdraw from the case. O'Neill praised them for their "extraordinary advocacy."

McMonagle and Agrusa defended Cosby at his first trial, in June, which led to a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on three counts of aggravated indecent sexual assault.  

After the hearing, the outgoing team of lawyers was seen shaking hands with the incoming team, which includes former federal prosecutor Kathleen Bliss of Nevada and Sam Silver, a Philadelphia litigator who represented now-imprisoned former Pennsylvania Congressman Chaka Fattah in a corruption case.

Cosby is charged with drugging and molesting Andrea Constand during an encounter at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He says the encounter was consensual. 

In a surprise move during the hearing, the new team also argued for picking a new jury in Montgomery County, where Cosby's home is located and where the second trial also will take place.

The first jury was selected from the Pittsburgh area — after Cosby's original team of lawyers argued for a change of venue due to pre-trial publicity — and spent two weeks sequestered in Norristown. That jury deliberated more than 50 hours over five days but remained hopelessly deadlocked.

Contributing: The Associated Press