The New Yorker:

The legal issue behind Weinstein’s successful appeal is also at the heart of the former President’s hush-money case.

By Ronan Farrow

On Thursday morning, a divided New York State Court of Appeals overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for sex crimes and ordered a new trial. The 4–3 ruling turned largely on the original judge’s decision to let into court evidence of alleged crimes other than the ones for which jurors had been asked to assess Weinstein’s guilt or innocence. The court had permitted women to testify about allegations of sexual assault that were separate from the three for which he was charged. It had also ruled that Weinstein, should he testify, could be questioned about his wider history of alleged misconduct.

Harvey Weinstein has been accused by more than a hundred women of various forms of sexual harassment and assault, with many of their stories reported in The New Yorker, and detailed in my subsequent book and podcast, “Catch and Kill.” Thursday’s news was greeted with anguish by activists and by Weinstein’s alleged victims. “This is an on-going failure of the justice system—and the courts—to take survivors seriously and to protect our interests,” Ambra Gutierrez, one of Weinstein’s early accusers, said, in a statement.

But Thursday’s ruling was, to many legal spectators, unsurprising. The idea that juries should consider only the crimes charged in a given case, and that evidence of other bad acts should be excluded, is a foundational principle of criminal law, designed to protect defendants from the unfair presumption of guilt. In New York, the precept is embodied in the Molineux rule, named for a 1901 case in which an appeals court overturned a verdict that found a chemist named Roland Molineux guilty of murder by cyanide poisoning. The appeals court held that the trial court’s admission of allegations related to an earlier, unrelated killing had invited jurors to consider the defendant’s general propensity for crime, rather than the facts at hand. This principle of fairness is simple. The intricacies of how it should be implemented are, as Thursday’s decision underscores, complicated. There are vast exceptions to the general prohibition of evidence of uncharged acts: the federal rules of evidence contain an exception for sex crimes, where, the logic goes, criminal conduct often hews to a pattern. 

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