Chicago City Wire

Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood producer and convicted rapist, and Stanley Wrice, Chicago resident and convicted rapist, both benefited from a controversial legal doctrine that restricts testimony demonstrating a pattern of abuse by a defendant.

Last week the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) ruled that the lower courts errored in allowing witnesses to Weinstein’s behavior in incidents – not included in the indictment. In New York, they are referred to as “Molineux witnesses.” Weinstein’s 2020 conviction was overturned.

And in 2020, a federal judge ruled in Stanley Wrice’s wrongful conviction case that a woman was not permitted to recount her years' long abuse by Wrice that began when she was 14.

The restriction on such testimony, the degree of which varies from state to state, hampers the prosecution of alleged sex offenders, Jane Manning, the director of Women’s Equal Justice and an expert on the law, told Chicago City Wire.

Manning said that a jury should be able to consider a defendant’s history of similar crimes as one factor, as long as it doesn’t overwhelm the case at hand.

“The low rates of justice for rape victims show that there is no rush to convict rapists; on the contrary, it’s victims who face uphill battles in the courtroom,” she wrote in an email.

Stanley Wrice was convicted of a 1982 rape and torture of the victim with an iron. He was sentenced to 100 years, but exonerated in 2013 on claims that Chicago police Sgt. John Byrne and Det. Peter Dignan tortured him into confessing.

In 2014 Judge Thomas Byrne rejected Wrice’s petition for a Certificate of Innocence (COI).

The judge said that the recantations of two of the witnesses in the case were “threadbare, untimely and untrustworthy.” He further said that it was impossible to believe that Wrice was unaware that a woman was being tortured, burned and gang raped in his bedroom while he was home.

But even without a COI, a federal jury in 2020 awarded Wrice $5.2 million in his wrongful conviction trial.

The jury was not permitted to hear the story that Jennifer Scott told in her deposition before the trial began – that Wrice repeatedly and violently assaulted her starting when she was 14.

From the deposition dated October 4, 2016:

Q. Okay. So at some point after this first meeting, did the two of you start dating?

A: No.

Q. No?  Okay. But within the next calendar year, you did have a daughter with him, correct?

A: A daughter with him, yes.

Q: Okay. Had you been involved with him romantically when you conceived your daughter?

A: It wasn't romantically, but I was involved.

Q: Okay. Can you explain that a little bit for me, please?

A: Well, as I say again, my age difference. I was 14 years old, innocent. I wasn't the type of girl that was out there having sex or wanted to have a boyfriend.

Q. Okay. Did you consent to have sex with Stanley Wrice?

A. No.

Q. Okay. Was there any violence around the sex that you had when your daughter was conceived?

A: Yes. Yes.

Q: Did you end up with physical injuries?

A: Yes.

Q. Okay. Did you ever contact the police?

A. At the time of a 14-year-old, of a person of my stature at the time, not wanting my mother to find out anything, no, I didn't.

In denying a motion for a new trial, federal Judge Harry D. Leinenweber explained his rationale for not allowing Scott’s story of abuse at the hands of Wrice during the first trial:

“Defendants [Byrne and Dignan] by their own admission, were clearly more interested in getting evidence in front of the jury showing that Wrice was a ‘violent criminal’ who ‘raped and beat Jennifer Scott when she was a child’ and to show the jury that Wrice had a propensity to harm women. This evidence was unfairly prejudicial and clearly barred.”