The New York Supreme Court overturns Harvey Weinstein’s sex crime conviction on procedural grounds

The New York State Supreme Court has overturned Harvey Weinstein’s sex crime conviction. The Court ruled that the judge who sentenced Weinstein to 23 years in prison in February 2020 erred in calling to the stand women whose allegations were not part of the indictments against the former producer. Weinstein was later convicted of rape in 2022 and served an additional 16 years in prison in Los Angeles.

It is now up to New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg to decide whether to put the former Miramax boss on trial again. The New York Court’s decision was made four to three by a panel of judges made up of a majority of women.

In 2020, Lauren Young and two other women, Dawn Dunning and Tarale Wulff, testified about their encounters with Weinstein under a state law that allows depositions about “prior wrongdoing” to demonstrate a pattern of bad behavior by the defendant. Today the Court ruled that “in our justice system the accused has the right to answer only for the crime for which he has been indicted.”

Over one hundred women accused Weinstein of sexual crimes in 2018, and their collective stories were the cornerstone on which the #MeToo movement was founded. In legal terms, however, the conviction of the former Miramax boss in New York has always been controversial and his lawyers’ appeals, according to experts, had always had a chance.