New York court overturns Harvey Weinstein’s conviction

New York: New York’s highest court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges, a stunning reversal in the foundational case of the #MeToo era.

In a 4-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who presided over Weinstein’s case had made a crucial mistake, allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses a series of women who said Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him.

Citing that decision and others it identified as errors, the appeals court determined that Weinstein, who as a movie producer had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had not received a fair trial. The four judges in the majority wrote that Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior.

Now it will be up to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — already in the midst of a trial against former President Donald Trump — to decide whether to seek a retrial of Weinstein.

It was not immediately clear Thursday morning how the decision would affect Weinstein, 71, who is being held in an upstate prison in Rome, New York. But he is not a free man. In addition to the possibility that the district attorney’s office may try him again, in 2022, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison in California after he was convicted of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel.

Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 100 women; in New York he was convicted of assaulting two of them. The Court of Appeals decision, which comes more than four years after a New York jury found Weinstein guilty, complicates the disgraced producer’s story and underscores the legal system’s difficulty in delivering redress to those who say they have been the victims of sex crimes.