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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 310-1 Filed 07/02/21 Page 71 of 80 To hold otherwise would recast our understanding of reasonableness into something unrecognizable and unsustainable under our law. If Cosby’s reliance was unreasonable, as found by the lower courts and as suggested by the Commonwealth, then reasonableness would require a defendant in a similar position to disbelieve an elected district attorney’s public statement and to discount the experience and wisdom of his own counsel. This notion of reasonableness would be manifestly unjust in this context. Defendants, judges, and the public would be forced to assume fraud or deceit by the prosecutor. The attorney-client relationship would be predicated upon mistrust, and the defendant would be forced to navigate the criminal justice process on his own, despite the substantial deficit in the critical knowledge that is necessary in order to do so, as so compellingly explained by Justice Black. Such an understanding of reasonableness is untenable. Instead of facilitating the right to counsel, it undermines that right. We reject this interpretation. We find nothing unreasonable about Cosby’s reliance upon his attorneys and upon D.A. Castor’s public announcement of the Commonwealth’s charging decision. The trial court alternatively suggested that Cosby’s belief that he would never be prosecuted, thus stripping him of his Fifth Amendment rights, based upon little more than a press release, was unreasonable because neither Cosby nor his attorneys demanded that the terms of any offers or assurances by D.A. Castor be reduced to writing. This reasoning is unpersuasive. Neither the trial court, nor the Commonwealth for that matter, cites any legal principle that requires a prosecutor’s assurances to be memorialized in writing in order to warrant reasonable reliance. We decline to construe as unreasonable the failure to do that which the law does not require. It also has been suggested that the level of the defendant’s sophistication is a relevant factor in assessing whether his reliance upon a prosecutors decision was [J-100-2020] - 70 DOJ-OGR-00004883