Former movie producer Harvey Weinstein ,showing in a Los Angeles courtroom in Oct. 2022.
Etienne Laurent/Getty Photos
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Etienne Laurent/Getty Photos
Former movie producer Harvey Weinstein ,showing in a Los Angeles courtroom in Oct. 2022.
Etienne Laurent/Getty Photos
Editor’s observe: This report consists of descriptions of sexual assault.
On Thursday morning, the best court docket in New York state overturned the 2020 felony intercourse crime conviction of former film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and ordered a brand new trial. Weinstein has been serving a 23-year sentence in New York on the premise of that conviction. The Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace instructed NPR it intends to retry the case.
The New York State Courtroom of Appeals present in a 4-3 resolution that Weinstein had not obtained a good trial, partially as a result of the trial decide allowed testimony from ladies whose allegations weren’t a part of that case. (In all, greater than 100 ladies made public allegations towards Weinstein.)
On behalf of the appeals court docket majority, Decide Jenny Rivera wrote partially within the ruling: “We conclude that the trial court docket erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts towards individuals aside from the complainants of the underlying crimes as a result of that testimony served no materials non-propensity objective… The one proof towards defendent [Weinstein] was the complainants’ testimony, and the results of the court docket’s rulings … was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant’s character earlier than the jury.”
These ladies testified in court docket as “Molineux witnesses” or “prior dangerous act witnesses” — which has been allowed in New York in sure conditions going again to 1900. Critics and authorized consultants say that software of the “Molineux Rule” might be extremely subjective, and leaves verdicts extra open to challenges.
In a written assertion to NPR Thursday, lawyer Douglas Wigdor, who has represented eight alleged Harvey Weinstein victims, together with two of the Molineux witnesses within the New York felony trial, mentioned: “In the present day’s resolution is a serious step again in holding these accountable for acts of sexual violence. Courts routinely admit proof of different uncharged acts the place they help juries in understanding points in regards to the intent, modus operandi or scheme of the defendant. The jury was instructed on the relevance of this testimony and overturning the decision is tragic in that it’ll require the victims to endure yet one more trial.”
It should now be as much as the Manhattan district lawyer, Alvin Bragg Jr., to launch a brand new trial towards Weinstein. Bragg is at the moment concerned in one other very high-profile case: the New York trial of former president Donald Trump, who has been charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying enterprise information within the first diploma. A spokesperson for the DA’s workplace instructed NPR Thursday in a written assertion: “We’ll do every thing in our energy to retry this case, and stay steadfast in our dedication to survivors of sexual assault.”
Regardless of the New York court docket’s resolution, one other conviction towards Weinstein stands for now. In Feb. 2023, a decide in Los Angeles sentenced Weinstein to a 16-year jail time period on a separate conviction of rape and sexual assault. That sentence is to be served consecutively after the New York jail time period. As of Thursday morning, Weinstein was being held in upstate New York, on the Mohawk Correctional Facility.
