Shortly after a New York appeals court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s conviction on rape charges in Manhattan, a defense attorney in the disgraced movie mogul’s Los Angeles case said the same should happen in California.
If Weinstein’s attorney Mark Werksman had any doubts about whether the same legal strategy would work in both states, he didn’t disabuse them in his comments after Thursday’s victory for his client.
“We faced the same fundamental unfairness in the Los Angeles case, where the judge let the jury hear about four undisclosed allegations of sexual assault,” Werksman said. “Harvey was charged with numerous and unverifiable allegations, destroying his right to a fair trial on the charges in the indictment. The case here should be overturned for the same reasons that the New York case was overturned.”
Not all legal experts are so convinced.
In its 77-page decision, the New York appellate court ruled that a Manhattan judge robbed Weinstein of a fair trial when he let prosecutors stand down three women who have accused the Miramax co-founder of sex crimes. , for which he was not charged. , Those witnesses included a woman L.A. prosecutors have accused Weinstein of assaulting.
At Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial — where he was charged with 11 counts of rape and sexual assault — prosecutors took a similar approach, calling four women to the stand who accused them of anonymous attacks in New York, London, Puerto Rico and Toronto. Was accused of.
Dozens of women came forward in 2017 to accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct, ruining his career and sending him to prison. The New York decision marks a rare victory following his fall, but experts said it was unlikely he would be able to recover his California conviction on similar grounds.
Dmitry Gorin, a former sex-crimes prosecutor in L.A. County, said a change in California evidence law in 1996 largely allows uncharged victims in sex-crime cases to testify if their allegations are based on a pattern of behavior or the commission of a crime. Can help prove the trend of.
“The California case is independent of the New York decisions that were overturned,” Gorin said. “The law on admitting evidence of prior sexual assault in California is very broad, and a judge’s decision to admit that evidence can be challenged as an abuse of discretion.”
Gorin said Weinstein’s chances of a successful appeal in California were “nonsense”.
LA County Dist. Atty. George Gascón told The Times that he was “comfortable with our conviction.”
“Our case against Mr. Weinstein is very solid. We did not use the same evidence that New York did,” Gascón said. “California law is strong when it comes to this type of evidence.”
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench, who oversees Weinstein’s 2022 trial in Downtown LA, placed significant limits on the number of witnesses to so-called “prior bad acts” called by prosecutors. At one point the number was in the double digits, before Lench limited prosecutors to four.
Over the past three decades, there has been a growing movement to relax the law in sexual assault cases, according to Daniel Medved, a law and criminal justice professor at Northeastern who used to be a criminal appellate lawyer in New York. Courts are becoming more open to introducing other evidence of sexual assault, she said, allowing prosecutors to build cases against suspected repeat offenders.
“If someone does it once or twice, they’ve likely done it multiple times,” Medved said.
While New York’s law may not be in line with evolving thinking on the rules governing testimony in sexual assault cases – where victims often do not come forward against their accusers until the statute of limitations on such crimes expires, Medved said the state rules provide a necessary layer of protection for defendants’ civil rights.
He said, “It’s a traditional view, maybe it’s a long-standing civil libertarian view, that a jury punishes someone not based on what they’ve been accused of, but for what they’ve done in the case.” punishes.” “Loosening the rules of evidence could be a slippery slope toward the erosion of all our rights.”
John Manley, who has prosecuted cases on behalf of victims in the cases of USA Gymnastics trainer Larry Nassar, the Catholic Church and USC and UCLA doctors, called the New York decision “a major step forward in the effort to bring serial sexual predators to justice.”
“Thankfully, this will have no impact on the prosecution of child molesters or serial rapists in California,” he said. “California addressed this same issue thirty years ago when it passed a law that specifically allows testimony of ‘bad acts’ showing a propensity to commit sexual assault.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose wife Jennifer Seibel Newsom testified at a Los Angeles trial that Weinstein raped her in 2005, said Thursday that Weinstein “should never see the light of day again. Period. Full stop.” “
“Let’s make something clear: Harvey Weinstein is a hardened predator, a rapist, twice convicted. not once. Twice,” Newsom said during a news conference on renewable energy at a solar installation outside Winters, a farm town near Sacramento.
Weinstein has denied all wrongdoing in both states and filed a notice of appeal in California, though a brief outlining the exact parameters of his appeal in L.A. has not been made public.
That filing is expected in late May.
Assistant editor Phil Willan contributed reporting from The Times’ Sacramento bureau.
