‘SURPRISED’

Ex-DA Reveals Why He’s ‘Troubled’ by Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction

Cyrus Vance brought the charges against the disgraced Hollywood mogul.

The Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted Harvey Weinstein to a rape conviction in 2020 says he was “surprised and troubled” when that conviction was overturned last month. Writing in The New York Times, ex-DA Cyrus Vance said the New York Court of Appeals decision bothered him because it reversed the “unanimous opinion by a panel of the distinguished intermediate appeals court that sustained every single aspect of the jury’s verdict and evidentiary rulings by the trial judge at the Weinstein trial.” He also called for the New York state Legislature to follow California in allowing prosecutors in sex crime cases to “introduce evidence of a defendant’s past but uncharged sexual misconduct, calling in witnesses whose accusations are directly relevant to, but are not part of, the indictment against the defendant.” Vance said sex crime convictions in New York will remain “vulnerable to a discretionary decision by the Court of Appeals” unless “we pass a law that lays out the legal standard for admissibility of uncharged crimes in all courts, for all cases.”