ALBANY, N.Y. (CN) — Lawyers for disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein asked a panel of judges making up New York's highest judicial authority, the Court of Appeals, Wednesday to throw out his 2020 rape and sexual assault convictions in New York City that led to a 23-year prison sentence.
A team of lawyers who represented the 71-year-old Miramax founder at his trial in Manhattan criminal court asked the Court of Appeals in Albany to overturn his 2020 criminal conviction because the trial judge allowed prejudicial testimony from three women whose accusations of sexual assault by Weinstein were not part of the state’s case-in-chief.
“It was his character that was on trial, it wasn’t the evidence that was on trial,” Brooklyn attorney Arthur Aidala told the panel during the hourlong oral arguments.
Weinstein’s lawyers argued the additional evidence was unwarranted overkill by prosecutors to portray the producer as “a bad guy”
“As a matter of law, it should not have been allowed,” Aidala said in reference to the additional witnesses called by New York prosecutors to testify about prior uncharged crimes and bad acts under precedent from the 1901 case People v. Molineux.
“I think if you disagree with me, you’re going to throw Molineux out the window,” Aidala said during his rebuttal argument.
The panel asked Aidala what was the legal threshold for such type of testimony, and he replied with a reference to the famous quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio: “You’ll know it when you see it,” Aidala said, conceding that there is no actual legal limit for Molineux evidence.
Associate Judge Jenny Rivera asked Aidala: “Is there something unique or particular to the kind of conduct to which you client was charged and found guilty that requires a rethinking of how Molineux is applied to that kind of case?”
Associate Judge Madeline Singas suggested the type of Molineux testimony admitted in Weinstein’s trial would be helpful jurors in some cases of sexual violence where intent is not so clear.
“The jury has a right to know that when these women are put into that position that he has done this time and time again, and he knows this isn’t a consensual because he knows these other women haven’t consented to that and ran out,” she said. “And amongst all of the power plays of his power in Hollywood, his power over their careers, there has to be a different assessment because sexual violence is different in these kinds of cases than in stranger-rape rooftop Vargas case.”
Weinstein’s lawyers want a new trial, but only for the criminal sexual act charge. They argue the third-degree rape charge cannot be retried because it involves conduct outside the five-year statute of limitations.
Chief Judge Rowan D. Wilson asked Aidala to explain when the statute of limitations clock began to run in connection with Weinstein’s charged crimes but he did not return to the issue on rebuttal.
Aidala also argued Juror 11 in Weinstein's criminal trial could not have been impartial because she had penned an autobiographical novel that involved sexual exploitation by “predatory older men,” and did not clearly disclose the relevant subject matter during jury selection.
Aidala was joined at oral arguments by Barry Kamins, a former New York City criminal court judge and partner at Aidala, Bertuna, & Kamins.
The charged crimes related to accusations against Weinstein brought by aspiring actor Jessica Mann, former "Project Runway" production assistant Mimi Haleyi and "Sopranos" actor Annabella Sciorra. Another three women testified at Weinstein's trial about their own interactions with the producer as aspiring actresses, though his trial did not include charges related to them.
Steven Wu, chief of appeals at Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, told the panel the Molineux testimony was properly admitted at trial “because under the distinct facts of the case, the evidence was material to the contested issue of the defendant’s knowledge and intent for charge.”
Wu said the juror was not dishonest in her representation about her book, which was about an older teacher making advances on a teenage student. Rather, she “accurately described it as not being about nonconsensual sex,” Wu told the panel.
The Manhattan jury deliberated for five days before delivering a split verdict in February 2020 that convicted Weinstein of committing a criminal sexual act and third-degree rape but acquitted him on the more serious offense of rape in the first degree and two counts of predatory sexual assault.
A month after jurors returned their verdict, on March 11, 2020 — the same date that the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic — Judge Burke sentenced Weinstein to 23 years in prison.
In his April 2021 appeal of the conviction to an intermediate state appellate court, Weinstein’s attorneys said the Molineux evidence presented at trial “served no legitimate nonpropensity purpose and was designed solely to breed contempt for Weinstein and distract the jury from fairly evaluating the evidence on the charged offenses.”
A five-judge panel from New York Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, First Judicial Department, refused to overturn the conviction, finding that prosecutors had properly used the evidence of unchanged, prior bad acts to illustrate his "goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him."
The Court of Appeals did not immediately rule on Weinstein’s appeal.
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