Emily Bazelon has a useful article about the Los Angeles district attorney's laudable decision to bring Roman Polanski to justice. I liked the deadpan first paragraph:
As the latest legal fighting in the Roman Polanski cases bounces from Switzerland to the California appeals courts, it's clear that Los Angeles District Attorney Stephen L. Cooley is not letting go of this one. The lawyers representing the film director, who fled Los Angeles 30 years ago after pleading guilty to charges he had sex with a 13-year-old girl, argued this week in a letter to the court that Polanski could wind up sitting in jail in Zurich for longer than the 48 days he had left to serve when he fled in 1978.
Yes, how tragic that Polanski might have to serve more than 48 days...because of his own decision to flee the jurisdiction. In addition to being self-evidently farcical, the arguments of Polanski's lawyers also remind us of how how light a sentence they believed that the Real Victim in this case was entitled to for raping a 13-year-old girl.
Since her colleague Will Saletan considers this highly relevant for reasons I can't fathom, I should raise one quibble:
The DA's office has another weapon against Polanski, members of Cooley's staff made clear when I was in the office. That's the other more serious charges against Polanski. Because he skipped town (yes, that's the recurring theme here), these other charges were never dismissed, as Rittenband had indicated, pre flight, that they would be. They include rape, child molestation, oral copulation, sodomy, and providing drugs to a minor. It could be hard, however, to prove these charges 30 years after the fact.
While many of the charges against Polanski could theoretically be pursued, the charges of "oral copulation" and "sodomy" almost certainly can't be. Although a defendant fleeing the jurisdiction raises an unusual wrinkle, it seems unlikely that a defendant could continue to be prosecuted for violating laws that have been repealed in the interim, and even if the laws were still on the books they would be unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable. Polanski will be held to account for aspects of his conduct that were non-consensual (including a 45-year-old having sexual relations with someone legally incapable of giving consent), which is how it should be.
--Scott Lemieux
