In a 4-to-3 choice on Thursday, New York’s highest court docket overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony intercourse crime costs, a reversal that horrified and dismayed most of the girls whose choice to talk out in opposition to Mr. Weinstein, a distinguished Hollywood producer, accelerated the #MeToo motion.
The New York Court docket of Appeals agreed with Mr. Weinstein’s protection group that the trial choose who presided over the intercourse crimes case in Manhattan, Justice James Burke, made a crucial error when he let prosecutors name as witnesses a number of girls who testified that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, despite the fact that none of these allegations had led to costs.
The ladies turned generally known as Molineux witnesses, a time period that refers to trial witnesses who’re allowed to testify about prison acts that the defendant has not been charged with committing. In writing for almost all, Choose Jenny Rivera stated allowing such testimony in Mr. Weinstein’s case had served to wrongly “diminish defendant’s character earlier than the jury.”
The ruling, 4 years after Mr. Weinstein was convicted of forcibly performing oral intercourse on a manufacturing assistant and of raping an actress, didn’t shock many authorized analysts who had questioned whether or not prosecutors had taken too massive a threat of their efforts to win over the jury.
In its choice, the court docket got here to the conclusion that prosecutors had performed simply that and, together with Justice Burke, had violated a central tenet of prison trials: Defendants ought to be judged solely on the fees in opposition to them.
Listed below are 5 takeaways from the court docket’s ruling:
The court docket cited “egregious errors.”
The court docket stated the trial’s equity had been compromised by two key prosecution methods: the usage of Molineux witnesses and the prosecutors’ disclosure that if Mr. Weinstein took the stand in his personal protection, they’d ask him about dozens of allegations of different crimes and boorish, scary conduct.
Earlier than the trial, throughout what is called a Sandoval listening to, Justice Burke stated he would let prosecutors query Mr. Weinstein about 28 allegations that included bodily attacking his brother, threatening to chop off a colleague’s genitals with gardening shears, throwing a desk of meals, and screaming and cursing at lodge restaurant workers after they advised him the kitchen was closed.
That menace made it inconceivable for Mr. Weinstein to take the stand despite the fact that he was “begging” to testify in his personal protection, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, stated throughout oral arguments earlier than the Court docket of Appeals in February.
In its majority opinion, the court docket agreed.
“The specter of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant’s proper to testify,” Choose Rivera wrote. “The treatment for these egregious errors is a brand new trial.”
The three dissenting judges slammed the bulk.
Three judges — Madeline Singas, Anthony Cannataro and Michael J. Garcia — dissented in a pair of scathing opinions that accused nearly all of persevering with “a disturbing development of overturning juries’ responsible verdicts in instances involving sexual violence.”
The judges stated the court docket had ignored proof that the Molineux witnesses had established: that Mr. Weinstein had displayed a sample of coercion and manipulation.
Choose Singas stated the ruling would make it more durable to make use of such witnesses in future sexual assault instances.
“Males who serially sexually exploit their energy over girls — particularly probably the most weak teams in society — will reap the good thing about as we speak’s choice,” she wrote.
Choose Cannataro stated the extra witnesses the prosecution had introduced had helped upend the still-pervasive notion {that a} sexual assault should contain “the stereotypical stranger in a darkish alley who isolates his sufferer or waits for her to be alone earlier than launching a violent assault.”
The case clearly precipitated stress among the many court docket, evident in a collection of back-and-forth statements between the judges, with the bulk defending itself in opposition to the dissenters’ claims that the ruling weakened the flexibility of accusers to push their instances via the prison court docket system.
“We don’t ‘shut eyes to the enduring impact of rape tradition on notions of consent, and intent,’” Choose Rivera wrote, referring to a part of Choose Singas’s dissent. “Quite the opposite, in step with our judicial function, our evaluation is grounded on bedrock ideas of proof and the defendant’s constitutional proper to the presumption of innocence and a good trial.”
Victims and activists are devastated however stay decided.
Daybreak Dunning, one of many Molineux witnesses who testified in opposition to Mr. Weinstein, stated she was requested after the ruling if she regretted testifying.
“My reply is a convincing ‘no,’” she stated in a press release. “I’m a stronger particular person for having performed so, and I do know that different girls discovered power and braveness as a result of I and different Weinstein survivors confronted him publicly. The tradition has modified, and I’m assured that there is no such thing as a going again.”
She and others inspired Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district lawyer, to retry the case. The 2020 case was tried beneath Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Mr. Bragg’s predecessor. By a spokeswoman, Mr. Bragg stated that he would retry the case.
Ashley Judd, the primary actress to return ahead with allegations in opposition to Mr. Weinstein, referred to as the information “unfair to survivors.”
“We nonetheless reside in our fact,” she stated. “And we all know what occurred.”
Ms. Judd appeared with a number of different sexual assault survivors and activists on Thursday at a rapidly organized information convention on the twenty ninth ground of the Millennium Hilton in Midtown.
Tarana Burke, the founding father of #MeToo, stated one of many overarching objectives of the motion — to get the court docket system to take sexual assault instances extra severely — is “lengthy, strategic and considerate.”
“The unhealthy factor about survivors is there are such a lot of of us,” she stated. “However the advantage of survivors is that there are such a lot of of us.”
Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in California nonetheless stands.
Mr. Weinstein, who had been serving a 23-year sentence at Mohawk Correctional Facility in upstate New York, realized in regards to the choice after somebody on the jail confirmed him a information report in regards to the ruling, in response to his lawyer, Mr. Aidala.
He talked to Mr. Aidala simply after 10 a.m., about an hour after the ruling got here down.
Mr. Aidala stated Mr. Weinstein “wasn’t emotional, like crying,” however he was “very gracious, very grateful.”
Even with the conviction overturned, Mr. Weinstein isn’t a free man. He’s nonetheless going through a 16-year sentence in California, the place a jury convicted him in 2022 of raping a lady in a Beverly Hills lodge. He was to serve that time period after his New York sentence. Now, he might be transferred to California, however he’ll more than likely be transferred from state jail to Rikers Island, the jail advanced in New York Metropolis, as he waits for Mr. Bragg to determine whether or not to push for one more trial.
… However he’ll quickly enchantment it.
After Thursday’s choice got here down, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer in California, Jennifer Bonjean, stated she anticipated the ruling to assist him when he appeals his California conviction on Might 20.
A jury in Los Angeles Superior Court docket deadlocked on costs of sexual battery by restraint, forcible oral copulation and forcible rape in December 2022. These costs had been associated to accusations introduced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and the spouse of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and Lauren Younger, a mannequin and screenwriter.
However the jury discovered Mr. Weinstein responsible on three different counts — rape, forcible oral intercourse and sexual penetration — involving an Italian actress who testified that he attacked her in a lodge room in 2013. The jury acquitted Mr. Weinstein of 1 depend of sexual battery involving a therapeutic massage therapist.
In that case, as in New York, prosecutors had been allowed to make use of witnesses who accused Mr. Weinstein of intercourse crimes that he had not been charged with. Nonetheless, the legal guidelines round such witnesses are completely different in California.
Jurors within the California trial had been “overwhelmed with this unhealthy character proof that was not legit, that tainted the entire trial in California from our perspective,” Ms. Bonjean stated.
Jodi Kantor, Jan Ransom, Chelsia Rose Marcius and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.