The women who came forward against Harvey Weinstein reacted with fury after the disgraced media mogul’s rape and sexual assault convictions were overturned by a New York appeals court on Thursday.
Weinstein, 72, was found guilty in 2020 of raping and assaulting two women, and is serving his 23-year sentence at a prison in upstate New York.
In a 4-3 decision on Thursday, New York’s highest court ruled the original judge made “egregious errors” in the trial by allowing prosecutors to call witnesses whose allegations were not related to the charges at hand.
Weinstein was once one of Hollywood’s most well-connected and powerful producers who made a series of Oscar-winning films. But behind the glamourous facade, it was a different story. More than 80 women have accused him of abuse ranging from groping to rape. Even with his conviction overturned in New York, he remains convicted of rape in California.
The Weinstein revelations launched the #MeToo movement in 2017, which saw women from all corners of society come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual harassment and assault.
It must be amazing to have that much money and influence.
Coincidentally the podcast I’m listening to as I type this is talking about a man sitting on death row who was convicted solely on the testimony of one “bite mark analyst” who was later shown to be an absolute fraud in a field that is already highly dubious at best. The appeals court in his case feels that just because the “expert” was wrong in all his other cases doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong in his. So that’s cool.
Charles McCrory is spending his 38th year behind bars, convicted of killing his wife. The bite mark expert in his case recanted his testimony, saying he now knows he cannot say whether a bite mark on the victim matched McCrory’s teeth. Yet the Alabama courts have declined to free McCrory.
Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals ruled earlier this year that the jury was capable of deciding on its own whether the bite marks matched, a finding that ignores science suggesting such perceived visual matches cannot be valid. The court also cited other evidence in the case, including a witness who said he saw McCrory’s truck at the house during the time of the murder. No physical or forensic evidence links him to the crime.
Three years ago, after the bite mark evidence in his case collapsed, McCrory was offered a deal: Plead guilty and walk free. He refused.
“I refused to take it because I didn’t kill her,” McCrory told NBC News from his prison facility. “I did not kill my wife.”
The Innocence Project is now pursuing appeals through the federal courts.
“Prison is hard — a lot of the stories that you see on the news about prisons, particularly Alabama prisons, are true,” McCrory said. “It is a nasty place, and it’s not a place I would wish on anyone.”
“I don’t give up hope,” he said. “And certainly there’s days of disappointment and days when you’re down and out … but I just believe that somewhere there’s a truth in this that will come out, and you can’t give up. That’s just not an option.”
https://news.yahoo.com/bite-mark-analysis-no-basis-204726311.html
That’s disgusting that the courts just can’t admit when they are wrong. Even after the testimony fell through, they still wanted to get a guilty plea out of the guy. I’m not surprised this is in the south. smh
Three years ago, after the bite mark evidence in his case collapsed, McCrory was offered a deal: Plead guilty and walk free. He refused.
That, right there, is the most disgusting part of the American
justicelegal system: nobody from the judge on down to the beat cop gives the slightest flying fuck about catching the correct perp; they only care about securing convictions so their records look good. They wanted him to absolve them of having fucked up and imprisoned the wrong person, and his continued imprisonment is nothing but an attempt to force that absolution from him.Not just the court. The prosecutor’s office as well. Their position is “we are ok with letting you go; as long as we can do it without admitting that we made a mistake”.
And this is an institutional problem. The conviction happened 38 years ago. Everyone involved in prosecuting the case is gone. The office of the prosecutor is simply unable to admit that the office made a mistake.
in a field that is already highly dubious at best
A huge amount of so-called forensic “science” is dubious. Blood splatter analysis, bite mark analysis, voice print analysis, handwriting analysis, all bullshit. Even more ‘respected’ forms of forensic analysis are not slam-dunks like people, including people on juries, are convinced they are. Fingerprints can be misidentified, especially if it’s a partial print (and it’s a myth that no two are alike anyway). DNA samples can be tainted.
Basically, the entire field of forensics is built on a lot of very shaky ground and, unfortunately, has resulted in a lot of wrongful convictions. It needs to be overhauled by actual scientists.
As far as I know, there has never been two people with the same fingerprints, it isn’t a myth.
Not that we shouldn’t be critical of our standards when it comes to evidence and what not.
We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead. I would say that puts that claim squarely in myth territory until there can be some way to show that it’s true beyond “we haven’t found two matching sets out of the small subset of people we’ve fingerprinted.”
Anyway…
The real problem, Cole notes, is that fingerprinting experts have never agreed on “a way of measuring the rarity of an arrangement of friction ridge features in the human population.” How many points of similarity should two prints have before the expert analyst declares they’re the same? Eight? Ten? Twenty? Depending on what city you were tried in, the standards could vary dramatically. And to make matters more complex, when police lift prints from a crime scene, they are often incomplete and unclear, giving authorities scant material to make a match.
So even as fingerprints were viewed as unmistakable, plenty of people were mistakenly sent to jail. Simon Cole notes that at least 23 people in the United States have been wrongly connected to crime-scene prints.* In North Carolina in 1985, Bruce Basden was arrested for murder and spent 13 months in jail before the print analyst realized he’d made a blunder.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/myth-fingerprints-180971640/
Imo, something isn’t a myth just because it’s hard to prove definitely due to a near infinite amount of samples. By the same argument you could pretty much discredit most knowledge. Dna being unique or the speed of light because we haven’t tested all individual photons.
Its healthy to always acknowledge the possibility but if there’s a mountain of evidence pointing one way, you kind of go with what you have.
Obviously though, it’s insane we don’t have better standards. It sounds like most times, it boils down to a judgment call from an expert and that is clearly not okay.
Its healthy to always acknowledge the possibility but if there’s a mountain of evidence pointing one way
You’re assuming the fingerprint is perfect. It might not be. In enough cases they do not have the full fingerprint. Then if there’s a match, was it actually a match or not?
For above, this caused problems though times. Especially with huge fingerprint databases.
Disagree with your statement that there’s loads of evidence pointing that fingerprint are unique. That’s not how they’re used. And there’s enough cases where it went wrong.
That’s not how they’re used. And there’s enough cases where it went wrong.
Yes and it has nothing to do with two people having the same fingerprint. We need to be much more precise on how we measure differences and what samples we allow (like no partials) but there isn’t an inherent fault in fingerprint evidence because there are multiples of the same one floating around.
I’m arguing against the notion that it’s individuals can have the same exact fingerprint and not talking about how we process them.
That’s not how science works at all. You don’t need to test individual photons to know the speed of light. That involves mass and energy. There’s a famous equation that allows you to calculate it if you re-order the variables, E=mc².
You do not present a hypothesis that has no evidence to back it up and pretend it’s true. That is not fact, that is folklore. Mythology.
You don’t ignore all the evidence just because every single bit of possible data hasn’t been parsed.
There has never been two individuals with the same fingerprint, out of all the fingerprints we have collected, they are all unique. This kind of points to all of them being unique and this will be true until we find one that isn’t.
There has never been two individuals with the same fingerprint, out of all the fingerprints we have collected, they are all unique
How many fingerprints have been collected versus how many humans have ever lived?
This kind of points to all of them being unique and this will be true until we find one that isn’t.
Again, that’s not how science works.
We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead.
This is true. Similarly, we haven’t tested and have no means to test if two well-shuffled decks have ever matched. But we do understand the mechanisms that underlie these phenomena, and (specific or ballpark) likelihood of an exact match occurring, and from those odds can make a reasonable assertion that a match has (in all likelihood) never occurred.
That being said, the approximate impossibility of an exact match does not make up for the other issues of fingerprinting as you quoted. The chances of finding someone’s fingerprint whole and readable to compare to a control may be far more likely than two distinct people matching exactly, but far more often the prints being used are nowhere near “whole and readable”
Okay, please show these odds since they are known.
From a quora post because IDGAF and I’m not doing any more deliberate research on this than that:
Galton Calculated that the chance of 2 people having the exact same fingerprint is one in 64 billion.
Dunno who Galton is, but there ya go
So some random person made a calculation according to another random person on fucking Quora and you think those are actual odds?
That’s so amazingly dishonest that I don’t know what else to say.
But let’s say he’s right. Let’s say it’s 1 in 64 billion. There have been over 100 billion people. That means at least 2 people have the same fingerprints based on the odds you have given me without checking their accuracy.
So thanks for proving my point.
Thing is, as with DNA, the whole fingerprint is not examined, just certain reference points. The chances of 10 points in a particular print matching another random person’s are much much greater than the whole fingerprint.
10 points in a particular print matching
You can run a better match test than that on GIMP just by using the difference blend mode and some rotation. It’s absurd that this is what they rely on instead.
I and the other user are talking about the actual fingerprint on the finger which looking at it now might not be the right term.
I’m mainly saying I don’t believe something is automatically false just because we haven’t verified all 8 billion datapoints, even more so when we’ve already sampled quite a bit. I don’t get why it’s fantasy or a myth like the other user is saying.
Hope this link works. Behind the Bastards is doing a few episodes on the bastards of forensic science.
I hope you read Radley Balko. He has done so much to expose the fraud of things like bite marks and other shit done by MEs.
This is why conservatives (or anyone else opposed to science and education) should not be allowed to work in criminal justice or law enforcement.
I had read at the time that it was considered pretty questionable and people weren’t sure it would stand up to appeal. You get accused of a crime, and there isn’t much evidence that you did it, but in the trial a bunch of people say that you did the same thing to them, but also without evidence and they didn’t report the crime.
The guy is obviously guilty and has gotten away with it because he was rich and powerful, but I can see how the scenario could be abused to convict someone who’s Innocent.
Just chiming in to say I appreciate seeing these reasonable takes
Love some nuance.
“Yeah sorry, there were so many victims, even ones that didn’t file, that we considered it character assassination”
So I guess the lesson to take away is that, if you want to be a prolific rapist, you better make as many victims as possible, apparently that serves to lower the bar for dismissal.
I think you’re missing the important part: be extremely wealthy.
"Commit so many crimes that the trials for your crimes interfere with the other trials for your crimes. "
- Trump… Probably
Just like with stealing money: you steal a grand and it’s jail time, you steal a million and you’re a respected person
Or, the lesson is: if you want to prosecute a rapist, don’t bring up rapes other than the one you are prosecuting.
The defense brought this up at trial not because Weinstein had expensive lawyers, but because any competent defense attorney would. At that point, the judge decided the defense was wrong, and the prosecution decided to take the risk that the defense was right. That risk backfired. Now, every Judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney in the juristiction is on notice about how to correctly apply prior bad acts rules to sexual assult cases, so they should be able to avoid making this mistake again.
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I don’t understand. If the witnesses allegations “were not related to the charges at hand,” then they shouldn’t affect the outcome of the trial, right?
Supposedly, it’s because a lot of the witnesses were also claiming to be victims, but also had never reported the attacks. It’s important to remember that his trial basically started the #MeToo movement, and his defense has basically managed to leverage that to go “these other witnesses weren’t relevant, because he was only on trial for the two rapes.”
Basically, imagine you’re on trial for a robbery you never committed. You’re a serial robber, but none of your victims have ever come forward. Then for this one particular robbery case (which you didn’t do) the floodgates open and all of your previous victims start popping up to go “oh yeah he definitely robbed me but I never reported it.” Again, you didn’t commit this specific robbery, and your previous robberies shouldn’t factor into your conviction on this case because you didn’t do it this time. It would be a miscarriage of justice to allow those previous victims to influence your current case.
If those victims wanted you convicted for their robberies, they’d need to come forward and accuse you of it for their specific case. But that isn’t what happened; They just attached themselves to an entirely separate robbery case, for robberies you had never been convicted of in the past.
To be clear: I 100% believe he did it. But this is how the courts are looking at his case. Instead of facing 80 separate charges, he faced 2 charges with 80 unrelated witnesses.
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Apparently it’s a quirk of NY law that’s rarely used because this can happen.
Listen to NYT The Daily’s for a good breakdown of the prosecutor’s gamble that lead to the overturning.
