Judgments | A New York court overturned Harvey Weinstein's conviction for sex crimes

New Yorker On Thursday, the court overturned the movie mogul For Harvey Weinstein the 2020 sentence for aggravated sexual crimes.

Weinstein, 72, convicted of sexual crimes committed in New York, has served a few years of his 23-year prison sentence.

The annulment decision was made by the New York State Supreme Court, or Court of Appeals. In its ruling, it found that the trial judge presiding over the case erred in allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses women who said Weinstein abused them. The accusations of the women in question were not related to the lawsuits filed against Weinstein.

Such a course of action violated the cardinal rule of criminal proceedings, wrote the US newspaper The New York Times on Thursday: namely, the accused should be judged only on the basis of the acts of which they are accused. Therefore, the court has now considered that the trial was unfair.

Now the decision made applies only to the sentence given in New York. The sentence given to Weinstein by a Californian court for the rapes that took place in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles is still valid.

In December 2022, a jury found Weinstein guilty of three counts of rape in Beverly Hills in 2013. All the rapes involved the same woman. Weinstein was convicted in February 2023 of the rapes in question 16 years to imprisonment.

Weinstein is currently serving his sentence in Rome, New York.

Weinstein's the case has been centrally connected to the so-called #metoo movement.

It all started in 2017, when The New York Times and The New Yorker published extensive exposés about Weinstein. With them, the #metoo movement eventually spread worldwide.

of The New York Times according to a total of more than 100 women have accused Weinstein of sexual crimes or harassment.

The legal case of Weinstein, who was one of the world's most influential actors in the film industry, was closely followed, for example, in 2020, when the verdict was given on the events in New York.

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Weinstein's case has been linked to the so-called #metoo movement.

The annulment decision on Thursday, a New York appeals court heard Weinstein's latest appeal of his convictions in February. At the time, the state's seven highest judges debated whether Weinstein had been treated fairly in court, The New York Times reports.

On Thursday, the decision to overturn the sentence was made by a majority of three female judges.

It was not immediately known if the case will be taken to court again. Weinstein's fate and possible retrial is now up to the Manhattan District Attorney by Alvin L. Bragg in hands. He currently has an unfinished trial against the former president on his desk Donald J. Trump against.

The New York Times looked in an article published on Thursday, that the overturning of Weinstein's conviction is not a surprise.

The first reason, according to the newspaper, is that the women who accused Weinstein in the state of New York said that they sometimes had consensual sex with Weinstein. The position of the women who accused Weinstein in the case was therefore not clear-cut. So the lawyers picked the jury to convince the witness in a controversial strategy that ultimately led to the conviction being overturned, The New York Times notes.

Correction 25.4. at 6:45 p.m.: The #metoo movement did not start with Harvey Weinstein's conviction in 2020, but earlier with the revelations published by The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2017, among others.

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