The highest court in New York State overturned Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes conviction. The disgraced figure who was sentenced to long, prison-terms in two major American cities ignited the #MeToo movement. Still, legally, his trial in New York was controversial and, this morning changed due to a single vote.
“The reversal of the conviction was determined by a single vote,” New York Times Reporter Jodi Kantor wrote. “By a majority-female panel of judges, who in February held a searching public debate about the fairness of the trial.”
Dawn Dunning, Lauren Young and Tarale Wulff testified against Weinstein in 2020 regarding their sexually-violating encounters with the producer. The testimonies were provided for context, supported by a state law allowing witnesses to share about “prior bad acts” in order to draw a pattern of behavior. The issue is, the court today decided that, “under our system of justice, the accused has the right to be held to account only for the crime charged.”
“I just telephoned Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Weinstein,” Kantor reported. “and shared the news from the court. ‘That is unfair to survivors,’ she said. ‘We still live in our truth. And we know what happened.’”
Weinstein’s Layer, Arthur L. Aidala, announced on a phone-call that this update was “not just a victory for Mr. Weinstein, but for every criminal defendant in the state of New York, and we compliment the Court of Appeals for upholding the most basic principles that a criminal defendant should have in trial.” When asked how Weinstein is taking the news, Aidala said, “this happened 10 minutes ago. He doesn’t even know yet.”
“This is a shocking and disheartening day for survivors of sexual assault, said the director of the Women’s Equal Justice project and a former sex crimes prosecutor. “This just shows how much more work we all have to do, to bring the ideals of the #MeToo movement forward.”
It is important to note that Weinstein will not be a free man as a result of this decision. He must allow for the overturning to process through the state’s justice system before returning to California to continue the sentence on his California-sex crime convictions.
A former Manhattan prosecutor and current Northwestern University Law professor told the New York Times, “I’m not shocked. The issue of whether Mr. Weinstein’s trial was fair is a really close question that could have gone either way.”
The validity or authenticity of the sex-allegations against Weinstein is not overturned nor are they in-the-air. This overturning is an unfortunate result of a valid technicality. “While Mr. Weinstein’s alleged victims could fill an entire courtroom, few of them could stand at the center of a New York criminal trial,” the New York Times reported, “Many of the horror stories were about a sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one.”
Many of these allegations were from states outside of New York, most-significantly, in California. Other allegations happed too long ago to be within statute of limitations and one woman’s accusation was removed from the trial as a result of police-misconduct allegations.
Regardless, the court of public opinion is understandably outraged.
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