Hard blow to the movement
The story has taken an unexpected turn for many and represents the reopening of a painful chapter that began in 2017. Then, women who had remained silent for a long time out of fear, decided to speak out in the press. Their testimonies led to relevant and famous figures being held accountable for their sexual excesses. Weinstein, now 72, was sentenced to 23 years behind bars for rape following the decision of a New York jury. But this Thursday, a state appeals court agreed with him and overturned the ruling.
This court ordered that the oral hearing be repeated, in a decision that had four votes in favor and three against. The resolution maintains that the judge who presided over the trial in lower Manhattan, Magistrate James Burke, prejudged the defendant with inadequate and biased orders. These include facilitating the testimony of women whose complaints were not part of the summary in question. They call it a “crucial error.”
In this way they conclude that the accused was not subjected to a fair trial. The four judges overturning the sentence stressed that Weinstein was not tried only for the charges brought against him, but rather for his past conduct.
“It is an abuse of judicial discretion to allow unproven accusations of nothing more than misconduct, which tarnish the personality of the accused, but which do not shed light on the credibility of the criminal accusations,” said Judge Jenny Rivera in the presentation of most.
Arthur Aidala, Weinstein's lawyer, replied that this resolution represents a victory for his client and also for all those accused before the New York court. He stressed that the appeals court maintains "the basic principles that any defendant must have in a trial."
The move means victims may be forced to go through the trauma again from the witness stand when they believed this was, if not a healed wound, then at least a cauterized one. However, it all depends on the prosecutor's office to decide whether or not to try to have another trial.
They have the consolation that the former producer will continue in prison. It will not be free. Until today he was in a prison in Syracuse, in the state of New York, and will soon be transferred to California. After New York, he was tried in Los Angeles, in 2022, where he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
In this second summary, Weinstein was acquitted of one of the accusations in which one of the women who testified in the Big Apple was involved.
The former king of Hollywood was accused of sexual abuse by more than a hundred women. In New York he was convicted of two of these attacks. After four years, this resolution from the state high court arrives, a circumstance that demonstrates how difficult it is for the judicial system to serve those people who claim to have been victims of sexual predators.
The decision to overturn the ruling is based on the testimony of four women who told the jury about their encounters with Weinstein. Although their cases were not related to what was being tried, the judge accepted that they could be illustrative of a pattern of action.
The other key element focuses on the fact that the judge authorized the prosecution to question the former producer for unsubstantiated accusations, looking back decades, if Weinstein decided to testify at the trial. According to his lawyer, this prevented his client from testifying in his defense. All together, he argued, “destroyed any resemblance to a fair trial.”
