Shortly after a New York appeals court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s Manhattan rape conviction, a defense attorney in the disgraced Los Angeles movie mogul’s case said the same thing should happen in California.
If Weinstein’s lawyer, Mark Werksman, had any doubts about the effectiveness of the same legal strategy in both states, he did not betray them in his comments after his client’s victory Thursday.
“We faced the same fundamental injustice in the Los Angeles case, where the judge let the jury hear four uncharged sexual assault allegations,” defense attorney Mark Werksman said. “Harvey was subjected to a series of incredible, uncharged allegations that destroyed his right to a fair trial based on the charges in the indictment. The case here should be overturned for the same reasons as the New York case.
Not all lawyers are so convinced.
In its 77-page decision, the New York appeals court ruled that a Manhattan judge deprived Weinstein of a fair trial when he let prosecutors call three women to the stand who accused the co-founder of Miramax of sex crimes for which he had not been charged. . Those witnesses included a woman whom Los Angeles prosecutors had accused Weinstein of assault.
At Weinstein’s trial in Los Angeles – where he was charged with 11 counts of rape and sexual assault – prosecutors took a similar approach, calling to the stand four women who accused him of assault without indictment in New York, London, Puerto Rico and Toronto.
Dozens of women came forward to accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct in 2017, ruining his career and landing him in prison. The New York ruling marks a rare triumph since his fall, but experts say it is unlikely he will be able to overcome his California conviction on similar grounds.
A 1996 change to California’s evidence law broadly allows unindicted victims to testify in sex crime cases if their allegations can help prove a pattern of behavior or propensity to commit a crime, Dmitry Gorin said. former Los Angeles County sex crimes prosecutor.
“The California case is independent of the New York verdicts that were overturned,” Gorin said. “The law on admitting evidence of prior sexual assault in California is very broad, and the judge’s decision to admit this evidence can be challenged as an abuse of law. discretion.”
Gorin added that Weinstein’s chances of succeeding in his appeal in California were “slim to none.”
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench, who oversaw Weinstein’s 2022 trial in downtown Los Angeles, placed significant limits on the number of so-called “prior bad acts” witnesses called by prosecutors. At one point, that number was in the double digits, before Lench limited the number of prosecutors to four.
Over the past three decades, a movement has grown to relax the law in sexual assault cases, according to Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern and a former criminal appeals attorney in New York. Courts are increasingly open to introducing other evidence of sexual assault, he said, allowing prosecutors to build cases against alleged repeat offenders.
“If someone does this once or twice, chances are they’ve done it multiple times,” Medwed said.
Although New York’s law may be out of step with evolving thinking about the rules governing testimony in sexual assault cases — where victims often don’t come forward against their accusers until long after the expiration of the statute of limitations for such crimes – Medwed said state law rules provide a necessary level of protection for a defendant’s civil rights.
“It’s a traditional view, perhaps an enduring view of civil liberties, that the jury punishes someone not for who they’re supposed to be, but for what they did in this case,” did he declare. “Relaxing the rules of evidence could be a slippery slope toward an erosion of all our rights. »
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether New York’s ruling would impact the Los Angeles case.
Weinstein has denied any wrongdoing in both states and filed a notice of appeal in California, although a brief outlining the exact parameters of his appeal in Los Angeles has not been made public.
This filing is expected at the end of May.
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