ALBANY, N.Y. — New York lawmakers may soon change the legal standard that allowed Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction to be overturned, with momentum building behind a bill to strengthen sexual assault prosecutions after the disgraced movie mogul’s case was tossed.
The state’s highest court late last month threw out Weinstein’s conviction in a ruling that said a trial judge wrongly allowed women to testify about allegations that weren’t part of his criminal charges.
Two weeks later, lawmakers are pushing a bill that would allow courts to admit evidence that a defendant in a sex crimes case committed other sexual offenses, while also giving a judge discretion to bar such testimony if it would create “undue prejudice” against a defendant.
“In sexual assault cases, which typically rely on testimony of the survivor, it is essential and critical. It allows a perpetrator’s pattern of behavior to be presented in court,” Assemblymember Amy Paulin, a Democrat sponsoring the bill, said at a rally for the legislation in New York City on Thursday.
New York does allow such evidence to be used in some instances, such as to prove a motive or common scheme, though backers of the bill, which include the deputy leader of the state Senate, said the current rule is in need of clarification after the Weinstein decision.
Paulin said 16 other states have similar laws, as does the federal government.
Weinstein, 72, has denied the New York charges. He is accused of raping an aspiring actor in 2013 and sexually assaulting a production assistant in 2006. His conviction in 2020 was a key moment in the #MeToo movement, a reckoning with sexual misconduct in American society.
New York prosecutors are seeking a September retrial for Weinstein. The former film executive has also been convicted of a rape in California and sentenced to 16 years in prison there. He is currently jailed in New York.
The bill has drawn early criticism from the Legal Aid Society. Amanda Jack, a policy director at the group, said the proposal is overly broad and “will move us so far away from any sense of fairness and due process that it must be rejected as a dangerous undoing of our system of criminal trials.”
Heather Ellis Cucolo, a professor at the New York Law School, said admitting such evidence requires delicate consideration from the court but could help jurors in sexual assault cases where two people are giving conflicting accounts of an incident.
“It’s incredibly difficult to weigh the evidence when it’s that he said she said, so the whole purpose then of using prior bad acts is to hopefully show that this is a pattern. This is something that this person has done with other victims,” she said.