We can at least take solace in the fact that he isn’t being released:
Even though the New York appeals court overturned Weinstein’s conviction, that does not mean he is getting out of prison.
After Weinstein’s sentencing in New York in 2020, he was extradited to California in July 2021 to face sexual assault allegations made by four women in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills between 2004 and 2013.
In December 2022, he was found guilty of rape, forced oral copulation and another sexual misconduct count involving a woman known as Jane Doe 1. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison in February 2023. Weinstein’s legal team has vowed to appeal that conviction as well.
Guy is literally an international sex pest:
Weinstein also faces charges in London for two alleged offenses in 1996.
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So the lesson here is be such a piece of shit that you single-phallically spawn a movement, then use a “target of a movement” defense to claim emotional bias. Our courts are completely devoid of justice.
To play devil’s advocate here, Lynch mobs arent justice.
The satanic panic in the 1980s and early 1990s was a movement where kids claimed daycare workers were committing atrocities. It led to something like 170 people getting charged with crimes and some of the accused committed suicide. Once the stories hit scrutiny the problems became clear – the kids said people were killed and eaten who were still alive. They talked about secret tunnels that didn’t exist. They talked about secret ultrasonic stealth planes that could land in a neighborhood could land secretly in a neighborhood in the northwest so kids could be kidnapped and sent to Mexico, then be flown back before their parents returned. It was a movement, but it was a false movement.
Historical Lynch mobs are a other example. Black men would be targeted by a mob for having the audacity of touching a pristine white girl (who nonetheless often fully consented and there was nothing illegal going on), and the mob would go string the guy up by the neck. It was a movement too, happened a lot, but it was just the personification of racism, and not justified by principles of justice.
A lot of people mistake moral indignation for righteousness and as a result seem to think that if a lynch mob shows up at your door you automatically deserve its full wrath. Really goes to show humans never change, even if we think we do.
Calling what happened to weinstein a lynch mob is disingenuous as fuck. It was an open secret he was a sex pest. Courtney love, when asked for advice for aspiring actresses, said “if Harvey weinstein invites you to a private party in the four seasons don’t go” in fucking 2005.
If you’re saying we should examine the credibility of the accusations, we already did that in court. This wasn’t some random arrest due to accusations, the motherfucker stood trial and, spoiler alert, went to jail.
Your post contains a potential basic logical fallacy. “A is B, therefore it is also C”
There’s a couple old songs that investigate such fallacies and how they can apply to a legal context. “I shot the sheriff” describes a criminal who admits to shooting the sheriff but it was justified, but did not shoot the deputy. Another song, “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan similarly tells the story about a guy who happened to be at a crime scene, and was robbing the register, but did not commit the murders found at the same crime scene. It’s a story about an actual black man who claims he faces systemic racism in his prosecution and was seeking justice. The man the second song was about got a second trial and the conviction stood, but in 1985 the conviction was reversed based on the idea that he did not receive a fair trial due to racism.
I don’t think that anyone can deny that Weinstein is creep, and we’ve all heard the recordings, we know that he’s a sex pest, but is he a rapist? He can be guilty of many things, including abusing his position as a powerful person in media in a way that is not allowable under labor laws, but the time of his trial, everyone on the face of the Earth had heard the media effectively complaining that he was guilty of any sex crime that they could throw at him. Regardless of the facts of the case, how could you possibly get a fair trial under some circumstances? Him being a sex pest ended up becoming a flashpoint for an entire social movement #metoo that took the entire world by storm shortly after, being the face of social movement like that how exactly are you supposed to get a fair trial?
He did things wrong, again there’s no doubting that, but in the same way that the hurricane could not get a fair trial in the racist 1970s America, even if Harvey Weinstein was pure as the driven snow which I am accepting he not, what’s your name and face is synonymous with all sexual impropriety committed by any powerful people on earth it’s pretty hard to get a fair trial. What else could they have accused him of and just got in a conviction because of course you’re going to convict him, hes Harvey Weinstein and everyone knows he’s a creep!
Now, am I saying that he definitely didn’t do the things that he’s accused of? I’m actually not. I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t sit through all the evidence. What I’m saying is that for justice to be blind in the same way that it needed to let the hurricane go when there was evidence he was being mistreated due to racism, it must also let Harvey Weinstein go if and only if there is evidence that he was being mistreated due to being made the centerpiece of some new global movement.
There have been instances where Reddit detectives went out and thought that they’d solved the case, and in the end ended up convincing a website of millions of people that someone was guilty of some atrocity that they didn’t commit. So for the justice system to actually work, it has to be very careful about being fair and balanced even to the people who are guilty of something.
I don’t think that my standpoint on this is particularly unreasonable, though it may appear so if one is emotionally charged and wants to get the bad guy.
Hasn’t he died in jail yet? Shame, thought that happened already.
are judges liable in any way for making bad calls in cases like these? like, can they lose ability to judge or something if they fail to uphold the law?