[Reuters]Roman Polanski arrested in Switzerland 31 years after fleeing trial

Yes a documentary. Aghast contention includes a documentary... Now like I said Im not a lawyer or anything. So when it is stated Polanski's lawyers have to be present, Im guessing its pertaining to when the Judge is holding a meeting on Polanski's case. If the prosecution is present, Polanski must have representatives present.

This judge "met with a California DA not involved with the Polanski case. What does that mean? Did he met with an acquaintance who is a DA and let him influence him? Was there grounds for a mistrial? Now, if Polanski was tricked into pleading guilty, and it can be proven, he should be able to take back his admission of guilt. He might have a hard time proving that, having going on the run before sentencing.

 

OK, OK, I know I am getting in late on this but did you say, they have two points then listed 4.

And I understand your just listing points not taking the Pro-Pederarse side.

 

To Aghast, I know your speaking mostly on the legal process or the thought process. I guess I didnt understand you saying things like the girls sexual history or drug use, that your just playing out the trial in your head? I think I need to read up more on the case. I dont know enough of it like the girl having a drug use history, if thats true. Also it seems you are stuck on Polanski's contention to the event. Dont forget the victims contention. What would be Polanski's motive? Also, I dont think you really answered my question, did the judge go back on his word? Instead of time served, what was his ruling?

And to address the "maybe is not out of the question". Maybe Polanski didnt even do it. Maybe he just took the blame for Jack Nicholson, who he thought he needed to protect to further his career. Maybe the 13 yr old was really a boy. Maybe the mom was a pimp. The possibilities are endless. Why stop there.... or why start

 

Without seeing the documentary (or hearing from the other side) I can't really say for sure whether the trial was flawed but last time I checked, that's what appeals are for.

Secondly, if this was Father/Reverend Polanski nobody would be defending him. He's famous, though, so we can make excuses.

 

WOW! Now it is the mom that is guilty

Rocket River
ANY ONE BUT THE 40 yr old man

 

Whoopi Goldberg weighs in

(pulled from Tyler Durden)

 

Like I argued earlier, people in this country are quick to dismiss and excuse rape and stat rape is not looked upon the same way as molesting little boys.

 

never was a whoopi fan
now less so
In the end. . the TALENTED rich
folx just beleive they should he held to a different standard
than us working slubs

Rocket River

 

If I could ask her a question . . I'd say
SO WHOOPI . .. ARE YOU SAYING YOU ARE PRO-LOWERING THE AGE OF CONSENT TO 13 .. . since other countries seem to think it is ok?

Rocket River

 

This is the point I was trying to make to you yesterday Rocket. Stat rape and rape in general is so poorly handled in this country its disgusting. "It's not rape-rape."

 

aghast, when you say that "the judicial system did not produce this outcome," what outcome are you referring to?

because the only outcome of this case is that polanski ran away; the judicial system never got a chance to produce an outcome.

if, however, you are referring to the unfairness polanski would suffer if he had gone to sentencing (and i suspect this is your meaning when you say "the judicial system seriously screwed up the case"), then you misunderstand the law.

• judges are not bound by the prosecutor's sentencing recommendations in a plea agreement. if polanski actually showed up for his sentencing, he would have been admonished and asked if he understood that

• there is nothing wrong with the judge assessing a penalty greater than what the prosecutor and defense agree to. if, as is rumored, the judge did impose a harsher penalty, it still would have been within the law.

• if polanski isn't happy once he realizes the potential sentence he is actually exposed to, he can withdraw his guilty plea before sentencing and take his chances at trial. the judicial system provides this remedy precisely so defendants aren't tricked into unfair plea bargains

• 
  even if the judge would have violated sentencing guidelines and gone beyond the allowable punishment, polanski would then have grounds to object and appeal after sentencing. the appeal isn't affected by the fact that polanski pled guilty because this is a collateral attack on the sentencing itself, not the guilt issue.

• the only legitimate claim that judicial misconduct actually took place would be the ex parte communications with the state. but even if there is proven misconduct, polanski doesn't get off the hook and the charges against him shouldn't be dropped. the proper remedy is for polanski is to stick with the plea agreement or go to trial, and for the offending judge to be sanctioned

the fairness issue is distinct from the legal issue, and i can't argue that your sense of fairness is wrong because it's completely subjective. but i think you might be discounting the severity of him fleeing because you misunderstand the sentence that polanski ran away from. he wasn't facing life in prison: if the judge did in fact reject the plea, he would likely have gotten a 3 or 4 year sentence. while the maximum statutory sentence at the time was 50 years, prosecutors have said the typical sentence was 1 to 3 years. maybe you can argue a life sentence for raping a girl is unfair, but a 4 year sentence hardly seems like some great injustice to me. it is more offensive to me that polanski decided a sentence other than what he bargained for was unfair, ran, and now has people arguing that because his sentence would have been unfair, it was ok for him to run (nevermind that nobody even knows what his sentence would have been, and thus has no way of knowing whether it would have been fair).

i guess i just wanted to say that there are plenty of strong arguments to be made that our justice system is flawed and our sentencing guidelines arbitrary. but roman polanski getting extradited back to the US to submit to the judicial process after skipping his sentencing just because he feared a sentence greater than the plea bargain or because the judge partook in ex parte communications simply is not one of them.

 

WTF does that have to do with anything? Jesus Christ Hollywood is stupid.

 

wonder if the Won will get dragged into this mess.

[rquoter] While a backlash emerged Tuesday among French politicians of all stripes about whether their government and others should have rushed to embrace the cause of the jailed film director Roman Polanski, his American legal team picked up an influential new member: the lawyer Reid Weingarten, a well-known Washington power player and close friend and associate of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

The recruiting of Mr. Weingarten was a strong signal that Mr. Polanski’s legal team intends to push hard on the Washington end of the case . . . A former government lawyer who once worked in the Justice Department’s public integrity division, Mr. Weingarten is described as one of Mr. Holder’s closest friends, and joined him in founding the See Forever Foundation, which helps disadvantaged children.[/rquoter]

 

we don't have to wonder if you're obssessed

 

They went so far as to create a biased, feature-length documentary to propagandize on Polanski's behalf and distract the public from the main issues of his two crimes.

 

You correctly understand me to mean that whatever sentence Polanski would have gotten would have been the product of a corrupt official, not that of blind Justice.

I do bow to your legal expertise; I probably did, due to my ignorance, blur the line between textbook illegality and the gross accumulation of supreme corruption / unethical behavior. However, I think your list which follows appears to also proceed from the constraint of a Platonic ideal of how the courts should work, an untainted process in which Polanski would have been duly advised of his rights and had proper recourse to avail himself of safeguards against the wrongs that existed.

What I've been trying to say is that the courthouse in which Polanski actually found himself appeared, to my decidedly untrained eye, to be a bizarro legal world, in which the prosecutor and defense attorneys, both seemingly honorable men, argued their cases not before an impartial court, but before a crooked umpire. The judge, who had a history of finagling the system to land all the celebrity court cases to himself gain press attention (the custody battles / divorce proceedings of Elvis / Brando / Cary Grant), in this case asked random passersby (journalists, bailiffs, and the aforementioned prosecutor) their opinions of the case, and seemed to follow their advice, rather than the law. The judge scripted / staged courtroom arguments between the prosecutor & defense for the benefit of the press / his viewing public, causing the prosecutor & defense attorney to vow to seek sanctions against the judge if he continued to do so. The judge, though he may have had the right to, repeatedly lied to both the prosecutor and defense, so much so that both have come out in public to discuss his corruptions.

(Dookiester, does it not speak to the heights of impropriety involved in the case that the prosecutor, though it might hurt his case and help Polanski on appeal, came forward to decry the judge's actions?)

Your estimate seems in keeping with what most similar violators got at the time:
Chron write-up:

Going from memory from a documentary that I watched some time ago, I knew that the maximum penalty was not life in prison, but thought it was in the range of fifty or sixty years. That's why I referred to it as a virtual life sentence above. My reasoning: Polanski was in his forties at the time; he would not have survived a fifty-year incarceration. And, despite the usual sentencing range for statutory rapists at the time, fifty years indeed appeared to be what he was facing, not the typical two, three, or your reasonable contention of four years. I am at a disadvantage: there aren't many clips of the documentary on YouTube. I can't find the relevant interviews online, and ten minutes of googling (which, really, should be the upper limit in Internet Fights) doesn't turn up anything concrete. Polanski and his attorney (based on conversations with the judge in chambers) were both under the impression that Rittenband, ignoring the plea bargain and seeking to make an example out of a movie star, was about to give Polanski the maximum sentence possible. The best I can do for a citation on that is my memory of the interviews, and the word of another member involved in the case and trial, the victim, Samantha Geimer:
LA Times: victim's op-ed

Like me, you seem to want to believe in a judicial system which is self-correcting, in which wrongs are quickly righted; however, even when the appeals courts do work (and based on my nonacademic reading on death row & exoneration cases, that's a depressingly infrequent percentage), they are at best sclerotic.

Polanski likely would have had to make his appeal while in prison, no? And, based on his 0-1 history of dealing with the American judicial system, he would have had to have hoped that his appeal would be handled by judges who were not equally corrupt? (0-2, really. The man was investigated in the slaying of death of his wife and eight-month old fetus, and at the time wrongly convicted in the public eye.) Having witnessed Rittenband's version of the American judicial system up close, he would have had confidence in our appeals process, why, exactly?

So, despite all the agreements he'd made with the court being arbitrarily broken up to that point, his proper choice was to stick around and rot in jail for the next several months / years during the appeal(s) process, and merely hope things worked out for the best, because that's the American Way?

I don't agree with his decision. But with the plane fueled up and waiting on the tarmac, I certainly, like the prosecutor in the case quoted below, understand the reasoning behind it. He was promised a sentence of time already served, plus the possibility of probation. The typical sentence for the crime, as per above, is a little over one to three years. The deal he worked out was for a little under that. Yet instead Polanski was facing (despite the review process that claimed he was not a sexual predator, despite the wishes of the victim, despite the prosecutor's recommendation, despite even the judge's own backdoor promises) fifty years behind bars?

This was a case in which the presiding judge, in seeking his own celebrity, sought to make an example of a movie star. If what the system offered in this case was not strictly illegal, it was surely unjust.

Fair enough. I think, though, that Roman Polanski's case is a perfect example of our judicial system run amok. It is a better representation of the flaws in sentencing because, clearly, he was guilty of the crime to which he pled guilty.

Do you really think that a sentence ranging from forty-plus days to fifty years, to be decided by a judge who all parties involved (the state, the defense, the press, and the victim) have shown to be venal / corrupt, is a proper reflection on our American ideals of jurisprudence?

Another (side) point: why did the US just now insist that the Swiss nab Polanski, and why did they comply? Media reports suggest it's because the LA DA only knew that Polanski was going to be in Switzerland because of the film ceremony, and thus all they had to do was ask. However, this seems like rubbish; Polanski frequently traveled to Switzerland, often enough that he owned a vacation home there. I think, arguably, the cause for the LA district attorney's renewal in trying to get Polanski was likely a result of the documentary about the case itself. When the documentary exposing the flaws in the case aired, per the film's website,

So, because it pointed out the failings of the California judicial system in its handling of Polanski's case, instead of provoking reform, the documentary had the perverse result, by angering the custodians of that failed system, of likely forcing Polanski back into that very corruption.

Additional relevant links/citations:

Spoiler

Time:

Wanted & Desired website:

 

As a total aside, I was on a jury that convicted a man for a similar crime, rape of an 8 year old girl that had occured over 10 years prior. We gave that guy 20 years in prison. Not trying to argue anything; just remembering.

 

You bring up a point

this whole. . THE JUDGE CHANGE HIS MIND STUFF
seems to all come from Polanski's camp
and
Even if the judge did . . is flight the preferred method of dealing with it
Should everyone on trial who don't think they will win . . .run away?

Woody Allen supports him . . WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED BY THIS ONE!

In my Opinion . . .If you support Polanski . . .YOU SHOULD SUPPORT SOUTH PARK MEXICAN!!

Rocket River
. . .