Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, D-Scarsdale, and Sen. Michael Gianaris, D-Astoria and Senate deputy majority leader, are pictured with sexual abuse survivors during a recent news conference to garner support for a proposal to change evidence rules in sex abuse trials.

A state appeals court’s decision to overturn the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul whose conviction was a landmark of the #MeToo movement, is prompting a state legislative response.

The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest appeals court, ruled in late April that the trial judge in Weinstein’s case wrongly allowed women to testify about allegations that weren’t part of his criminal charges.

Sen. Michael Gianaris, D-Astoria and Senate deputy majority leader, and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, D-Scarsdale, have introduced A.4992/S.9276 allowing courts to admit evidence of related behavior in sexual assault and rape cases.

“New York State law needs to support survivors of sexual assault and their ability to seek justice,” Paulin said during a recent news conference with Gianaris and supporters of the bill. “Sex offense trials often rest on the testimony of the survivor, whose credibility is then attacked. That’s why patterns of behavior must be allowed as evidence. Sexual assault survivors have already gone through enough trauma. Now that the Weinstein case has been overturned, it’s more important than ever to pass this bill.”

Unlike most states, New York does not have a statutory code of evidence. The majority of New York’s evidence rules come from case law, and a limited number of rules are contained in the Criminal Procedure Law. Many states have adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence, one of which states in a criminal case in which a defendant is accused

of a sexual assault, the court may admit evidence that the defendant committed any other past sexual assault.

In 2020 Weinstein was convicted in New York of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape. The judge in Weinstein’s trial allowed for the admittance of evidence of his prior sex assaults under a doctrine known as the Molineux Rule that was decided in a past Court of Appeals case. At that time, according to the legislative justification compiled by Paulin and Gianaris, Weinstein’s defense team unsuccessfully filed an appeal arguing that such evidence should never have been allowed. That decision was then overruled this year.

Weinstein, 72, has denied the New York charges. He was charged with 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 want to retry Weinstein in September. He has also been convicted of rape in California and sentenced to 16 years in prison there. He is currently jailed in New York.

“Victims of sexual assault deserve the ability to share their experiences when their abuser is charged with a new sexual offense,” Gianaris said. “This proposal would help brave survivors tell their stories and bring New York in alignment with federal rules of evidence.”

According to the Associated Press, the proposal from Paulin and Gianaris 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 “promote the troubling assumption that defendants have an apparent propensity to commit the crime at trial if they have committed a similar crime in the past.”