On Thursday, New York’s highest court overturned former film producer Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on sex crime charges. The decision horrified many of the women who spoke out against Weinstein, accelerating the #MeToo movement.
The court agreed with Weinstein’s defense team, who denied the allegations against the film producer. Several women testified that Weinstein had assaulted them, even though none of those allegations led to charges.
The Molineux witnesses, named after a historic legal case, are witnesses who can testify about crimes not directly related to the charges against the defendant. However, in the case of Weinstein, the use of such witnesses was deemed unfair by Judge Jenny Rivera. She argued that allowing this testimony unfairly diminished Weinstein’s character in front of the jury.
This ruling comes four years after Weinstein’s conviction for sexual assault and rape. Many legal experts had already questioned the prosecution’s strategy, wondering if they had taken too much of a gamble by introducing these witnesses.
The court ultimately agreed with these concerns, stating that the prosecutors had overstepped boundaries by allowing testimony unrelated to the charges. This decision reaffirms a fundamental principle of criminal trials: defendants should only be judged based on the specific accusations against them.
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