A vacated New York conviction is why a California court has ordered Weinstein resentenced

The California Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District ruled on 26 June 2026 that Harvey Weinstein's 2022 Los Angeles convictions stand, and that his sentence does not. The panel of three justices, in a decision reported as running to 112 pages, rejected his attempts to disturb the jury's verdicts and found no cumulative error warranting reversal. It vacated the 16 year sentence and sent the case back to Los Angeles County Superior Court for a fresh sentencing hearing.

The reason is a chain of decisions that is usually reported in pieces. Judge Lisa B. Lench imposed the 16 year term on 23 February 2023, after a jury convicted Weinstein on 19 December 2022 of three of seven counts, forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by foreign object, all arising from a single incident in February 2013. The sentence was ordered to run consecutively to the 23 year New York term. In imposing it, the trial court relied on the New York convictions as an aggravating factor. In March 2023 Los Angeles prosecutors said they would not retry him on the counts on which the jury had hung.

On 25 April 2024 the New York Court of Appeals reversed the New York convictions of 24 February 2020, on which Weinstein had been sentenced to 23 years on 11 March 2020. The accounts opened for this report agree on the ground: the trial judge had admitted testimony from other accusers about uncharged conduct, contrary to the state's Molineux rule, and this was described as egregious error. They do not agree on the composition or margin of the reversing court, and this report therefore does not state one. What matters for California is only that the convictions ceased to exist.

That left a Los Angeles sentence resting in part on a conviction that had been wiped out. The Court of Appeal's answer was not that the Los Angeles jury got anything wrong. It was that the arithmetic of the sentence had been built on a fact that is no longer a fact.

The New York case did not end with the reversal. A retrial began with jury selection on 15 April 2025 and deliberations on 5 June 2025. On 11 June 2025 the jury convicted Weinstein on one count of criminal sexual act and acquitted him on another. It could not reach a verdict on a third count, and a mistrial was declared on that count the following day. That count was tried again, and on 15 May 2026 a second jury deadlocked and a further mistrial was declared. On 25 June 2026, one day before the California ruling, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced there would be no fourth trial on it. This masthead does not identify complainants, and does not do so here.

So the sequence runs: a New York evidentiary ruling in 2024 destroyed the New York convictions; the destruction of those convictions removed an aggravating factor from a California sentence; and a California appellate court in 2026 vacated that sentence while leaving the guilty verdicts intact. No appellate court has said the Los Angeles jury was wrong about anything. The resentencing is an accounting correction, not a reopening of the trial.

What happens next is only partly known. Weinstein remains in custody, and the sources opened record a New York resentencing listed for September 2026 on the count on which he was convicted in June 2025, with prosecutors there reported to be seeking 20 years. In California, the Superior Court must resentence him without reference to the vacated New York convictions, and no date for that hearing appears in the material available. The maximum exposure on the three California counts has not changed; what has changed is the set of facts a judge may weigh in choosing a term within it.

Two structural points are worth stating plainly, because they are routinely lost. The Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District sits mainly in Los Angeles across eight divisions of four justices each, and hears cases in randomly composed three justice panels. The New York Court of Appeals is that state's highest court, with a chief judge and six associate judges appointed to 14 year terms. Neither court retried anything. Both were reviewing how earlier courts had handled evidence and sentencing, and in each instance the ruling that made the headlines was a ruling about process.

What is not yet known is what sentence the Los Angeles court will impose on remand, whether the New York resentencing in September 2026 proceeds as listed, and whether either side will seek further review of the 26 June 2026 decision. Weinstein's separate English charges, brought by the Metropolitan Police in June 2022, remain unresolved in the record examined for this report.