One More Polanski Thought

Tom Reese’s observation is probably right: “Father Polanski would go to jail.”

Something tells me hotshot directors wouldn’t be lining up to demand the release of someone accused of the same crime who wasn’t one of them. (Well, maybe Woody Allen would…) So how is what they’re calling for now anything other than celebrity justice?

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  • spob

    A lot of journos seem to be taking up the cause too . . . .

  • nflfoghorn

    Woody simply marries jailbait.

  • destor23

    Now a crack at Woody Allen. The outright hostility towards artists and outsiders is appalling.

  • gysgt213

    So Woody Allen drugged and raped a 13 year old and was convicted and jailed?

  • square1

    Is this a joke? First off, Father Polanski would hardly go to jail. Please. As if we don’t all know that a tiny fraction of Catholic sexual abuse cases have been prosecuted, largely because the Catholic Church has relentlessly defended priests to the point of obstructing justice.

    I’m not going to defend Polanski’s behavior, but the reality is that he received unequal justice decades ago and extraditing him now, at the age of 76, seems pointless in the extreme.

    If Americans find Polanksi’s behavior too abhorent to stand and the French don’t, let the French have him and let us move on with our lives. The victim apparently has.

  • square1

    Two further points. There is law and then there is justice. On the law: Roman Polanski is entitled to a legal presumption of innocence. He was never proven guilty in a court of law. He pled guilty based upon a plea deal that the judge improperly revoked:

    According to court documents, Polanski, his lawyer and the prosecutor thought they’d worked out a deal that would spare Polanski from prison and let the young victim avoid a public trial.

    But the original judge in the case, who is now dead, first sent the director to maximum-security prison for 42 days while he underwent psychological testing. Then, on the eve of his sentencing, the judge told attorneys he was inclined to send Polanski back to prison for another 48 days.

    IOW, if Polanski knew in advance that he was going to serve 90 days in a maximum-security prison then he apparently would never have pled guilty and the State would have had to prove his guilt and the State might have lost. That is the law.

    As for Justice, I think a lot of sympathy for Polanski is based on a sense that, in the grand scheme of things, Polanski has not gotten away with anything: He has already served 42 days in prison, he lost his Hollywood career, and he has been unable to return to the U.S., even to visit the grave of Sharon Tate.

    Which leads to the final point that he likely would never have been in the situation in the first place if his pregnant wife hadn’t been brutally murdered.

    All this doesn’t excuse Polanski for his actions, but it does explain why people may feel that extraditing the guy at this point is overkill.

  • http://theblindspotsofgod.wordpress.com lawyermommy

    “There have been repeated attempts to settle the case over the years, but the sticking point has always been Polanski’s refusal to return to the United States to attend hearings. Prosecutors have consistently argued that it would be a miscarriage of justice to allow a man who “drugged and raped a 13-year-old child” to go free.”
    ______
    Settle the case??? That sounds like they want to work out some sort of deal with this man. He needs to serve the same jail time as other child predators.

    He drugged and raped a child, does not matter more than his movie career or celebrity status? What about the victims rights and those of her family?

    I know the wheels of justice grind slowly but in this case I hope no one clogs it up so that Justice is not done in the manner it should be…

    This man confessed to a heinous vicious crime against an innocent child and somehow his “celebrity” appears to be minimizing this horrific crime. Sad indeed!

    LM

    http://theblindspotsofgod.wordpress.com/

  • plukasiak

    Something tells me hotshot directors wouldn’t be lining up to demand the release of someone accused of the same crime who wasn’t one of them.
    _
    something tell me that Amy wouldn’t be denouncing CIA directors who lined up to demand the non-prosecution of torturers who weren’t working with/for the CIA….

  • spob

    What were the terms of the plea deal, square1? Some plea deals arent revocable if the accused doesn’t get an agreed-to sentence, others are. If Polanski couldn’t revoke the deal, then your analysis is off. Moreover, the fugitive disentitlement doctrine is out there as well.

  • ymmartin

    And further, that’s why have an appeals process. He felt that the judge would reneg on the deal, ok, definitely something to fear, but god knows that lawyer of his at the time could not legally suggest that he LEAVE the country rather than face the final judgment of the court and then appeal the decision.

    And one thing that bugs me about this…and I think LawyerMommy might agree considering her post below…is he PLED out. He had every right to see the case go to a jury. The prosecution did him a huge favor dropping from 6 to 1 count of sex with a minor, and with a recommendation of time served. I don’t know too many other pedophiles that would get such a sweet deal.

    He pled guilty, so whether he was or not, he admitted his guilt for all intensive purposes. Works out a deal, but still is afraid of facing the judgment, and off he goes. Nope, his time has come. That is why we have laws. All are equal before the law and all who are convicted must face the consequences.

    Honestly, for all of the intelligentsia coming to his defense, outraged that his arrest is a travesty of justice, who screamed about the countless innocent people on death row? Where’s all of the screaming and shouting for a case like this:
    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

    Hmm, too bad for that guy he wasn’t a director.

  • spob

    I suspect that Square1 isn;t going to be able to answer these questions . …

  • square1

    ymmartin: I am not going to get into a drawn-out debate about 1977 California penal law. I don’t know nearly enough about the case to discuss it comprehensively and I have no interest in educating myself.
    .
    Personally, I don’t think that this is a “travesty” of justice. I do think that it is a waste of time and money to extradite a 76-year-old guy from Switzerland who skipped out on serving the remaining 48 days of a 90-day sentence 32 years ago, when the victim has been urging the court to drop the case, and the judge at the time appears to have been more concerned with publicity than justice.
    .
    I’m not even arguing that they should drop the case. If the prosecutors want to keep the arrest warrant alive so that Polanski never returns to the U.S., fine by me. I’m just saying that I don’t see the benefit of extraditing him.
    .
    That is why we have laws. All are equal before the law and all who are convicted must face the consequences.
    .
    For those who wish to live in society, they must adhere to society’s laws, for better or worse. But Polanski chose NOT to live in this society. He chose NOT to live in California or the U.S. following the conviction. He chose to live on a separate continent for the last 3 decades. My attitude is just that California should say good riddance.
    .
    My understanding is that California is going through something of a budget crisis. It seems like a waste of resources, but whatever…

  • spob

    “He pled guilty based upon a plea deal that the judge improperly revoked . .. .”
    .
    Care to back up that bit of analysis?

  • http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=27658 Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » The Polanski defense

    [...] Amy Sullivan and a bunch of other theocons write that it’s unfair that some pedophile priests have to go to jail when Roman Polanski doesn’t. [...]

  • exile500

    If Roman Polanski were a priest, he’d have his own order. The worst that might happen would be that he’d be invited to spend the rest of his life in penance and prayer.

  • spob

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/michaeldeacon/100011795/roman-polanski-everyone-else-fancies-little-girls-too/
    .
    And the quote:
    .
    “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
    .
    From Polanski’s own mouth.

  • mfbattle

    square1,

    I have to say that your view of justice is very odd. For example the statement:

    For those who wish to live in society, they must adhere to society’s laws, for better or worse. But Polanski chose NOT to live in this society. He chose NOT to live in California or the U.S. following the conviction. He chose to live on a separate continent for the last 3 decades. My attitude is just that California should say good riddance.

    Are you saying that if I commit murder I do not have to go to prison if I leave the country and find another country that does not care? And that the country I committed the murder in should not ‘waste’ money trying to get me back? Because it seems to me that this approach to crime would be very problematic. Also, didn’t Mr. Polanski leave his the country of his birth and come to live in the USA (one can only assume of his own free will) when he committed the crime? Doesn’t that mean that he was subject to US and California laws?

  • dollared

    Amy, your ignorance is shocking. You can’t possibly have any personal knowledge of the Catholic Church – I do, and it takes two hands to list the priests I have met who have been outed over the last 20 years. And did any of these that I know, and did all the THOUSANDS of Father Polanskis worldwide, go to jail? No, the global and local heierarchy of the Catholic Church protected the thousands of sexual predators among the clergy, stonewalling any attempts at investigation for decades, for generations, and sheltering the criminals and in many cases providing excellent climates for re-offense.

    These are facts, Amy. Are you a journalist? I know the WaPo exists to provide the wealthy, powerful and connected a platform to make false statements in defense of their patrons, so they are excused for adding the Catholic Church to the list of favored (defense contractors, torturers, foreign dictators, insurance companies, etc.). But you work for Time. What is your excuse for propagating such absolute falsehoods?

    I’d love your response about your professional responsibility, but I’ll let you discuss this with your editor first. In the meantime, can you list 3 pederast priests in the US that are in jail at this time? Just 3, out of how many hundred?

    Truly, this is a trivial issue compared to trillion dollar wars of choice in the Middle East, health care, delegitimization of a duly elected president, visible and ignored Congressional corruption, the Supreme Court’s hostility to our attempts to limit control of corporations over our political processes and discourse, etc. but one key aspect of all of this is lousy, afactual, unprofessional journalism. And you just crystallized the problem in one, simple post. So start with finding the 3 priests in jail, just to show you actually think about facts before you communicate with the public in your professional capacity.

    Please, Amy. Facts, Amy. Just this once.

  • dollared

    And just to be clear, Roman Polanski is slime. But I don’t care about him or his case.

    And here, Amy, I’ll spot you one: Donald McGuire, Chicago. And second, Shanley in Boston. All you gotta do is find one more. BTW, LA and Boston settlements combined, over 1000 victims. But the Church really deserves our sympathy, don’t they? And a special blog post to portray them as victims of selective justice, don’t they?

    Amy, important things are going on in the world. How do you prove to us you can handle the important ones, when you spend so much time on the trivial, and do it so poorly?

  • bgjtenn

    First, the judge is not bound by an agreement between prosecutors and defense lawyers.

    Second, the sentence that it was afraid that he was going to receive would still have been unbelievably inadequate for the crime he committed. I think that drugging and raping a 13 year old child ought to earn you at least 5 – 10 years.

    Third, he is a fugitive from justice. He should be prosecuted for leaving the country. He doesn’t get leniency for thinking that he can predict the future and know what the judge was going to do.

    Finally, the guy is scum. Any woman who worked with him or is defending him should feel proud of supporting rape!!

  • crashgrab

    No, what’s appalling is the people defending a admitted/convicted child rapist. And Woody Allen cheated on his wife by sleeping with his adopted daughter. Yeah, these guys are real winners.

    I love Woody Allen’s films, but geez, that doesn’t make him a good person.

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