New York’s top court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges Thursday, in a shocking decision reversal of the most high profile case of the #MeToo era.
The New York State Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who handed Weinstein’s case “erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts,” allowing information to be presented that prejudiced the jury because the accusations weren’t part of the charges against him.
Weinstein, now 71, served about four years of his original 23-year sentence in a prison in upstate Rome, New York.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is currently trying former President Donald Trump in the hush money case, will have to decide whether to retry the case.
While he could potentially not be retried in New York, Weinstein will not walk free. He was also convicted last year in California for the 2013 sexual assault and rape of an Italian model at a Beverly Hills hotel room, where he faces 16 years in prison.
In the February 2020 New York conviction, a jury found Weinstein guilty of third-degree rape of Jessica Mann and a criminal sexual act of Miriam Haley. It also found him not guilty of two other serious charges — predatory sexual assault against Haley, Mann and “Sopranos” actress Annabella Sciorra — and the first-degree rape of Mann.
He appealed the verdict in 2021, arguing that a specific juror who had written a novel about “predatory older men,” and the admission of witnesses testifying to “prior bad acts” witnesses, affected his ability to have a fair trial.
Weinstein has been accused by more than 100 women of misconduct but the trial focused on the accusations of just Mann, Haley and Scoirra. It was the testimony from three of these other women — costume designer and former aspiring actress Dawn Dunning, Model and former aspiring actress Tarale Wulff and model Lauren Young — that sank the conviction.
“Every person accused of a crime is constitutionally presumed innocent and entitled to a fair trial and the opportunity to present a defense,” Judge Jenny Rivera of the New York Court of Appeals wrote in the decision that overturned Weinstein’s conviction, adding that the presumption of innocence is “a basic component of a fair trial under our system of criminal justice.”
Rivera continued that “the accused has a right to be held account only for the crime charged, and thus, allegations of prior bad acts may not be admitted against them for the sole purpose of establishing their propensity for criminality.”
While prior convictions may be used to “impeach the accused’s credibility,” Rivera wrote that the testimony detailing uncharged alleged prior sexual acts” against women who were not involved in the charges against Weinstein was unfair.
“The court compounded that error when it ruled that defendant, who had no criminal history, could be cross examined about those allegations as well as numerous allegations of misconduct that portrayed defendant in a highly prejudicial light,” Rivera wrote. “The synergistic effect of these errors was not
harmless. The only evidence against defendant was the complainants’ testimony, and the result of the court’s rulings, on the one hand, was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant’s character before the jury.”
This is a developing story, more to come…
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