Now we know what it takes to get a Daily Kaplan columnist outraged!
The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski Polanski, who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial, has been pursued by this case for 30 years, during which time he has never returned to America, has never returned to the United Kingdom., has avoided many other countries, and has never been convicted of anything else. He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.
I have no real opinion about this case — I think Polanski broke the law, but it was years ago and the victim says she prefers he not be prosecuted at this point. I tend to think pursuing the case may be a waste of time. But, given that he did commit a fairly serious crime, I can see why perhaps he should be prosecuted. (EDIT NOTE: I rewrote that last paragraph after I thought more about it.)
But of all the examples of police/prosecutorial conduct to get outraged about. Our government has been torturing people for years. Police regularly taser the old and infirm. Innocent people are being executed in our criminal justice system. It’s now acceptable for people to arrested in their own homes for sassing cops.
It’s hard not to think that Applebaum empathizes with Polanski because she occupies the same societal class that he does. Imagine the horrors of never crossing the Atlantic again! Much worse than being forced to shove needles into your own veins.
Update. Poland is interceding on Polanski’s behalf. Their foreign minister…Anne Applebaum’s husband.
MikeJ
When will big government get off the back of the small time paedophile?
El Cid
And for some reason, many of us convince ourselves that the right thing to do when confronted with such silliness is to work harder and ignore the apparent answer in favor of explanations other than sheer class bias, because to take the obvious answers would be the weirdo hippie and conspiracy fringe like, because, you know, shut up, that’s why.
gnomedad
One more for the Lexicon.
General Winfield Stuck
A nose for a nose, I say.
Warren Terra
Also recently on the Op-Ed page of the Kaplan, Michael Gerson’s concern about the exploitation of technology by hatred, the phenomenon of which he says:
Except that, rather than referring to Glenn Beck or Michael Savage, he’s calling out fringe extremists who post “anonymously” on the internet. And he’s not even naming any particular sites he sees as a problem, just the problem of “anonymous” postings to assorted mainstream websites. Gerson is worried about a coarsening of our national discourse, but he attributes it to the virtual equivalent of graffiti punks, rather than the inescapably ubiquitous professionally designed virtual billboards dripping with hate, fear, paranoia, propaganda, and assorted nonsense – that is to say, Beck and his kin.
(I say “anonymous” in scare quotes because I’ve used this single handle exclusively for at least seven years, and I hate people who conflate what I see as a dignified pseudonymity with anonymity)
Walker
He fled, after pleading guilty.
This is the absolute worse thing you can do. If we are to be a country of laws, this simply cannot be permitted, no matter how much he “turned his life around”. If we let him go, then we have to let every Wall Street banker who runs to the Caymans go as well.
If there is to be leniency, it can be in the sentencing phase.
DougJ
You’re a very nosy fellow, kitty cat. Huh? You know what happens to nosy fellows? Huh? No? Wanna guess? Huh? No? Okay. They lose their noses.
My favorites:
Jake Gittes: Mulvihill! What are you doing here?
Mulvihill: They shut my water off. What’s it to you?
Jake Gittes: How’d you find out about it? You don’t drink it; you don’t take a bath in it… They wrote you a letter. But then you have to be able to read.
Ida Sessions: Are you alone?
Jake Gittes: Isn’t everybody?
But the whole movie is gold.
DougJ
Also recently on the Op-Ed page of the Kaplan, Michael Gerson’s concern about the exploitation of technology by hatred, the phenomenon of which he says:
I actually agreed with that piece. Newspapers should moderate their comments if they’re going to have them.
freelancer
Classist Elitism: Teh Kaplan haz it.
Scott
I’m not at all surprised that they’re opposed to holding the rich and powerful accountable for crimes they may have committed. Just think what chaos would be unleashed!
Brachiator
I’m looking at one of the ways that Kaplan thinks that Polanski “paid” for his crime:
Oh, the horror!
The Polanski case came up in another thread. Because we are a society, we view a crime as committed against the people, as well as the victim. And, as in domestic abuse cases, we consider a victim’s call for leniency, but we are not bound by this.
And thanks to the Internet, and the Smoking Gun site, we can read the original grand jury testimony, and get an idea of the horrible crime for which Polanski was originally convicted.
He drugged and then raped a 13 year old girl, vaginally and anally. I respect the adult victim’s call for leniency. But I also have to look at the original testimony of that 13 year old girl.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/polanskicover1.html
Warren Terra
Sure, newspaper comment sections tend to be an absolute sewer (the New York Times, which does moderate, is an exception). But he starts off the whole piece by recalling how in 1920s Germany Talk Radio was a means for the spreading of hate and paranoia, and the parallel he finds in modern America is … newspaper comments that almost no-one reads? When we’ve got our own massively popular talk radio purveyors of hate and paranoia, practically all of whom are on his side of the political spectrum? I wonder how he possibly saw around the beam in his eye to perceive the mote in another’s that he wrote about.
Mnemosyne
@Walker:
Yep. It has very little to do with the victim’s opinion and everything to do with his expressed contempt for our justice system.
Now, I pretty much guarantee you that the prosecution was fucked up, because the LA district attorney’s office always fucks up high-profile prosecutions, but that’s not an excuse for fleeing the country and thumbing your nose at us for 30 years.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Christ, spare me this laws are for little people, O how the great man has suffered bullshit. Anyone who tries to gin up sympathy for people who fuck minors isn’t worth the effort of delivering a much needed cock punch.
Polanski plead guilty so the vic. saying all is forgiven is irrelevant. He took off before he was sentenced. This makes law enforcement officials very cranky, and gives them permission to chase after your ass for as long as they want. If he hadn’t plead and took off, the SoL likely would have run by now.
t jasper parnel
You know he raped a 13 year old vaginally and anally, right? Plead guilty and then fled because he worried that the plea bargain would be overturned, right? He deserves serious jail time.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Sorry Walker, I didn’t see your comment and this dirty commie fascist platform doesn’t allow editing or deletion on FF.
Johnny
I’m outraged that anyone could suggest that paying lawyers’ fees counts as punishment for a crime. That’s just outright class warfare.
Of course, I am a law student with a vested interest in my profession-to-be.
Keith G
Re Polansky, I could not care less, tho I do wonder why he could not get legal advice about which countries to avoid.
An evil doer 40 yrs ago. An idiot now.
Comrade Luke
From a commenter over at Atrios:
geg6
I am a huge fan of Roman Planski’s filmwork. And there were problems with the case. But he pled guilty. And then refused to live up to his plea, thumbed his nose at our justice system, and has cringed and whined while avoiding any accountability for decades. He should be tossed into prison with no more than a fare thee well.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@t jasper parnel: My understanding is that the plea bargain was to plead guilty to a lesser charge (sex with a minor) and the sentence was time served; this seems to be pretty well documented. Also well documented is the impending judicial decision to strike the bargain. Now, I don’t have the resources and sympathy to flee the country if I see screwiness in the judicial system, but I can’t exactly blame someone else for doing so. This sort of plea bargain renegging happens all the time to low-profile criminals, and I believe it’s considered a serious miscarriage of justice.
Warren Terra
Off topic: Dan Riehl decides, based on absolutely nothing, that murdered census worker Bill Sparkman might have been a child predator. Because it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
via LGM
NR
Polanski drugged and anally raped a 13 year old girl.
I can’t believe we’re even having a discussion about whether or not he should be punished. Lock the sick fuck up for the rest of his life. The end.
Warren Terra
Don’t miss Comrade Luke’s link at #18. Very telling about the powerful people backing each other up to do favors for their famous friends.
trollhattan
I dunno, after watching the HBO thing on Polanski I think I can understand why he fled. He did a stint in a mental ward, for pete’s sake, never mind the various savage things that occurred to him over his lifetime (which I don’t think qualify as extenuating circumstances in this case, but anyway). There was some judicial hanky panky, to be sure.
My bottom line: Why does anybody give a shit these many decades later? My non sequitur: Dick Cheney walks among us a free man. Why?
Brachiator
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
No. It’s a little more complicated than that, although a recent documentary about Polanski has sought to deliberately distort the facts to make things appear more favorably toward Polanski.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski
Based on the grand jury testimony, Polanski had a great lawyer, who was able to get the original charges downgraded.
t jasper parnel
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason: He raped a 13 year old girl vaginally and anally the plea bargain was crap, imho, and he ought to have done serious time.
The testimony paraphrased:
someguy
So he drugged and raped a 13 year old girl. Societally speaking in the U.S., that’s no big deal for the Rich & Famous. In Republican circles, that’s known as “I made a mistake. I’ve spoken with my wife and minister about it. Now I look forward to getting back to the business of serving my constituents.” Shit, if he was a Republican senator, they’d be standing up a “Re-Elect Roman Polanski PAC” as we speak.
t jasper parnel
@trollhattan: It is possible that the Cheney’s war crimes and Polanski’s rape are separate issues, isn’t it?
Roger Moore
@Warren Terra:
IOW, the little snots have now invaded places he cares about. He doesn’t give a damn if talk radio is full of vile filth- influential vile filth- because talk radio is somebody else’s medium. But start touching his own medium, even with something that’s peanuts compared to Limbaugh, Beck, and company, and he’ll start whining.
Ash Can
OK, wait a minute. According to the previous thread, the NYT is worried that it’s not taking the right-wing propaganda outlets and their bullshit seriously enough, and now Anne Appelbaum, not to mention France and Poland, are bemoaning the fact that someone who drugged and raped A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD has been arrested? And even more people are saying BFD about it?
Has the entire fucking world suddenly gone raving, drooling, batshit insane without telling me?
Gads, I picked a bad night to be sober.
t jasper parnel
@Ash Can: I agree but +9
Ash Can
@NR:
This.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
Because, unlike Polanski, Cheney never pled guilty to his crimes and then fled the country to escape punishment for them?
I’m all for “innocent until proven guilty,” but once you plead guilty, that means you don’t get that benefit of the doubt anymore.
The Dangerman
So, Dude gets arrested for being in his own home while African American, the Right asserts it was his own fault for mouthing off to the cops; now this “outrage’. Do these fuckers have no shame (rhetorical question)?
t jasper parnel
As my previous comment awaits moderation:
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
I assume that you must have been on some pretty powerful stuff- or maybe in a monastery or some other place with no connection to the outside world- for most of the past 10 years. That’s the only way you could possibly have failed to notice that the world has been totally, raving, batshit insane for quite a while. Do you have any recollection of the Clinton impeachment? How about both terms of the Bush 43 administration? The utter insanity of the first 8 months of the Obama administration? What about this event suddenly clued you in to the world’s state of insanity if those things didn’t?
Brick Oven Bill
Islam is not yet ready for prime time. It is uncool for men to marry 9 year old girls. 9 years is too young. At the same time, women mature long before their 18th birthday. I do not profess to know the magic number. In order for Islam to prevail, it must embrace the Seven Liberal Arts however.
But Islam is on the ascendency. It quite possibly could be our collective futures, in some modified form. Mohammed was a brilliant man. I could handle four wives if I were allowed to shut them up.
“The most dedicated people there are from Europe. They will do anything for Islam. They are not there because their fathers are Muslim, but by choice.”
kth
This Huffington Post blogger thinks the arrest is outrageous because 14 years old, which the victim almost was, was the age of consent at the time, and the kid’s mother was a horrible stage mom who totally pushed her kid on a hapless Polanski.
Jon-Benet Ramsey’s killer’s lawyer (if he’s ever caught and needs one), take notes: if you can redirect blame to undeniably creepy parents, your client just might skate.
mai naem
While I believe Polanski is a scumball for what he did, I have a bit of a problem with the US government spending a good chunk of change on getting this guy back when even the woman/girl he raped wants the charges to be dropped. I have to believe they have been following Polanski closely to get him arrested. I doubt the Swiss just did it on their own without the Americans asking for it. When all is said and done, they’ll probably spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars on this.
Roger Moore
@kth:
I’m amazed you could make it through that. I had to bail when she said:
Anyone who could be that badly out of touch with reality simply isn’t worth reading.
General Winfield Stuck
OT
I just want to say that Dan Riehl is one sorry ass excuse for a human being and always has been, I hope the motherfucker diaf, every day for the rest of his miserable life.
that is all.
The Other Steve
My guess is he’ll probably come back to the US, the govt will give him a 30 day sentence in jail and then that’ll be it.
After all what he did was ultimately not as bad as what Martha Stewart did and she deserved to hang.
Incertus
@kth: I don’t know who this Joan Z. Shore is, but she can take a flying fuck at a rolling donut for all I care. I won’t even watch Polanski’s films anymore–when it comes to child rape, I can’t separate the art from the artist. Sorry. There are enough other great movies out there I can spend time watching without supporting a fuck like that.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Warren Terra:
Even more interesting is Ezra Klein’s response to Gerson, and then most interesting of all, Gerson’s childish, embarrassing, uninformed name-calling response to Klein.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/09/hate_in_the_media.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/09/klein_drowns_in_the_ethical_sh.html
I thought Gerson’s first piece was complete bullshit and I said so here that day. He describes how talk radio was used by the Nazis to stir up right wing hate– then he jumps to “the internet” as a comparison, completely ignoring the fact that we actually have the same right wing talk radio, doing the same thing, now. Not some stretched equivalence, but basically the same thing.
His response to Klein was even better though, if you use a scale of how embarrassing and adolescent someone can be while missing the point and accusing someone else of doing so.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Roger Moore: I actually agreed with pretty much everything she wrote about that.
Swiss banking had non-disclosure rules that had nothing to do with “money laundering” as its main goal, and anyone who thinks that’s silly has never had a bank account in Europe. French banks also operate by a very different system than the US, you can’t just “do a credit check” on anyone, for instance, no matter who you are. They’re actually far more draconian in other ways. e.g. if you bounce one check it’s a fairly major thing, and until you’ve gone to the business, gotten proof that you covered the debt in cash, return that to the bank, and they clear that through the Bank of France, you won’t have a working bank account. and if you never clear it, you’ll never have an account again.
It’s a different idea of privacy altogether, and their bowing to US style rules is a fairly amazing thing, and really another legacy of the last eight years. I’m not condemning the basic idea of more transparency, but thinking that they were only private for shoddy, secret money-laundering reasons is silly.
bago
@Brick Oven Bill:
I have one word for you, you ignorant motherfucker.
Toledo.
Read and learn.
Polish the Guillotines
@Warren Terra: Jesus snowboarding Christ. Dan Riel is one seriously worthless piece of shit. And he proves it by tripling down on the skeeze by defending himself over and over in the comments.
May Bruce Lee’s ghost side-kick him the fucking neck.
I now need to flush my eyes with hydrogen peroxide after reading that shit.
Bill E Pilgrim
@trollhattan:
Yeah, this is my feeling about this also. This is really what I want them spending time on, with all that’s going unprosecuted in this country, sending people to Switzerland to stake out someone on a 1970s morals charge, one that had dubious prosecution at best and by all accounts (of the judge who most recently ruled on it for example) would now be thrown out.
Mark S.
@Comrade Luke:
She should really be fired for not disclosing that.
Oh, what am I thinking? The entire journalism business has become sleazier a brothel in Tijuana.
@General Winfield Stuck:
Agreed.
Mnemosyne
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Good to know that drugging, raping, and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl can now be hand-waved away as a “morals charge.”
Comrade Luke
@Mark S.:
Hahahahahahaha. Good one!
Comrade Luke
Blockquote FAIL.
Incertus
@Mnemosyne:
All that plus a dose of “I’m too important to spend any more time in jail so fuck you and your plebeian justice system motherfuckers” as well. It’s a bit Randian, if you ask me, the idea that prison sentences are for the little people, not the producers in society. Nope–I don’t care how much they spent to stick Polanski in jail. It’s worth it to serve as an example.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Mnemosyne: “Waved away”?
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying if it were all prosecuted starting now or were to come up as a current day case that it would be dismissed or “waved away”.
My “would” of “would be dismissed now” meant that if he is in fact extradited to the US, it very likely will be thrown out, in the judge’s opinion, not because it was not a crime, but because he had already served the time agreed to before the judge allegedly reneged on the plea.
I could say “it will be thrown out” but that’s a bit more fortune teller than I’d like to be.
Mark S.
Actually, my girlfriend and I once had a debate about who was stupider: Dan Riehl or Confederate Yankee. I think I argued the latter, but I might change my mind now.
riffle
Well you’ll never believe this. Polanski is, of course, Polish and the Polish government is interceding on his behalf.
Mr. Anne Applebaum is the Polish Foreign Minister. Found here:
here.
or a plain URL if that doesn’t work.
http://bestofbothworlds.blogspot.com/2009/09/she-wouldnt-wouldnt-she.html
The Village strikes again! Blogger ethics panel!
Something Fabulous
@Comrade Luke: @Mark S.: I came back to comment on that, I was still thinking about it a while later. There is something so perfectly–is symbolic the word I want?– about how insular and grotesque that is: could be a lexicon definition of “Villager.”
Warren Terra
@ Bill E Pilgrim #42
I was unaware of Gerson’s response. Rather pitiful.
Mnemosyne
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Prostitution is a “morals charge.” Drug use is a “morals charge.” Rape is an assault charge.
Polish the Guillotines
@riffle: Just for laughs, I emailed the WaPo ombudsman asking why Applebaum was allowed to write that apologia without disclosing that hubby was lobbying for clemency on behalf of Polanski.
I expect I’ll get an inbox full of zilch, but what the hay.
Something Fabulous
@riffle: …and I swear yours wasn’t posted yet when I wrote mine…
Corner Stone
Can’t even get past this. 13.
Pled guilty, hang him by his testicles with piano wire, the former 13 year old doesn’t get to wave this off.
Calouste
So, Mr. Anne Applebaum, Radosław Sikorski, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland. Member of the Bullingdon club while at Oxford, advisor to Rupert Murdoch, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That’s a big money conservative trifecta there.
What makes me wonder is how a former student-activist asylum seeker from a communist country manages to get in to and afford being a member of the Bullingdon club, which is as upper class as it gets. Costs for their annual dinner start with 1500 pounds for the uniform and end with a share of the repair bill for the restaurant.
Brachiator
@Bill E Pilgrim:
People keep asserting this as a fact, but I find nothing in the court record that corroborates your statement.
I would think that a judicial error would establish the basis of an appeal. Instead, Polanski simply flew the coop to evade justice.
Jason Bylinowski
I generally tend to lean towards advocacy of the victim’s wishes, and in this case it would seem the victim would prefer to just let go of the whole thing. I respect that, and could very well see wanting the same thing myself after so many years. That said, he should still get the book thrown at him for fleeing. He’s going to have good representation, so I somehow doubt that he will end up in jail for long, if at all, but you can’t just ignore the fact that he purposefully and willingly bit his thumb at our justice system (& whatever the reason may be will surely be explained, as he will have his day in court).
And I say this as a very big fan of his work and in full recognition of his importance as an artist. I saw the HBO special on him, and although I can see some mitigating factors here, I came out of it wishing that he would just turn himself in and be done with it. Now he just gets to do the perp walk and perhaps ruin his legacy (though I doubt it, he’s still a brilliant director, and this IS hollywood, after all.)
Yutsano
@t jasper parnel: This. I have never had any respect for Polanski because, well, he decided it was better to just run rather than face the consequences of the crime he had agreed to serve time for. Hollywood is definitely on the wrong side of the issue here.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Brachiator:
I wrote this:
it very likely will be thrown out, in the judge’s opinion, not because it was not a crime, but because he had already served the time agreed to before the judge allegedly reneged on the plea.
I was repeating what a judge had recently written as his opinion, not repeating it as “fact”.
Interesting the extremes this seems to bring out.
jl
@Corner Stone: I demure and suggest hanging by balls with piano wire is not quite the thing to do. Call me a DFH.
But, I think he should be brought back. Not sure what disposition of the case should be , but the rich and powerful must obey that law too.
The crime was bad, victim’s current attitude irrelevant for a case like this. He did plead guilty and then went on the lam after court seemed very lenient to me.
Nice touch, that the columnist, whom I never heard of before, didn’t see the need for a disclosure. I think the corporate press’ ethics are clear enough by now.
jl
I never liked Polanski’s movies much. Too much standing around and deep thoughts and stuff. I had to watch some of his films for a class once. I remember the beginning of Knife in the Water. A boat. Some problem or other. People standing around. Deeps thoughts. More boat. More standing around and tension. Water. Something happened finally. I forget what exactly, couldn’t pay attention enough to follow the story.
I don’t remember anything else. Maybe I fell asleep. Can’t remember the other films. May not have gone. but I think I saw at least one more.
Sleeper
As I understand it, Polanski agreed to a plea bargain, waived his right to trial and pled to a lesser charge with a sentence of time served, and then the judge completely violated the rules by A) announcing intent to revoke the bargain and give Polanski more jail time, B) spoke about the case ex parte to people in the District Attorney’s office about how to get him on more time, and C) held press conferences about the case. If you’re going to negate a plea agreement, then at least give the guy the right to change his plea and get a trial. The whole thing looks like a judge hunting for headlines and deciding to make an example of Polanski.
Or at least, that’s the case Polanski’s lawyers are making. I’m still not really sure what led the DA’s office to go easy on Polanski in the first place. Presumably they judged their case was not strong enough to pursue the stronger charges, and decided to settle for tagging him with a criminal conviction on his record. Or else they felt his celebrity and the still-fresh memories of Charlie Manson might make him sympathetic enough to get a hung jury.
The fact that 31 years later we are spending money to go forward with this, when we have made a deliberate decision to completely ignore the crimes of the Bush Administration, is fucking absurd. Polanski fucked up and did a despicable thing, but the victim wants this dropped and Polanski is obviously not a threat to any other American children, he has not to my knowledge been charged or convicted of anything since he returned to France. This is a waste of time.
Llelldorin
@Jason Bylinowski:
Fundamentally, though, the justice system doesn’t represent the victim. It represents the people, and society at large. The idea that someone can drug and rape a 13-year-old child without repercussions because of their wealth and social status is dangerous to society, regardless of the private willingness of the victim to forgive.
Yutsano
@jl: I’ll be honest: if I had to name a Polanski movie to save my life I couldn’t do it. I only have a marginal interest in him because Sharon Tate used to be my dad’s babysitter (in fact I think her sister still lives in this area but don’t quote me on that). BTW if you wanna hear really weak sauce listen to Anjelica Huston’s reasons why Polanski did it.
Anne Laurie
But Peggy Noonan would tell you: Sometimes you just need to keep on walking.
Dubya’s too dumb to be paying attention, but I’m sure Darth Cheney is monitoring ‘public opinion’ (read: Villager chatter) on Polanski very, very closely.
Bill E Pilgrim
Jason Bylinowski
@jl: Yeah, he has some stuff like that, but Chinatown is a very accessible movie, especially for crime drama/noir film buffs. There’s more to his catalogue than just Chinatown (The Pianist was also very good, and a recent example, for those of you who don’t like so-called “classic cinema”) but in my opinion (and many others) Chinatown will go down in history as one of the very best movies of all time.
Which is not to say, of course, that the man should walk free. I just wanted to give an example of his work that wasn’t so artsy fartsy, because he’s always been fairly mainstream in my opinion.
Anyway, the clock is striking two, and I better hit the hay. Hope you guys manage to solve the world’s problems while I’m gone; I’ll check back in the morning for confirmation of this!
jl
@Sleeper: I think Polanski needs to be brought back to resolve the case. AND Cheney and his henchmen should be investigated, and if sufficient evidence (uh… DUH!), prosecuted.
So, as a citizen, I do not see the miserable failure of the Obama administration to do enough to address Cheney’s reign of error and lawbreaking affects what should be done with Polanski.
BTW, I checked Wikipedia, and I have a vague memory of Repulsion too. I was repulsed, from what I remember of it. And I am not anti-art film. I like Bunel. And can tolerate those bizarre Resnais films that don’t make a lick of sense and are populated by weird upper crust French people acting weird and French.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Sleeper: That was supposed to be a response/repeating of what Sleeper wrote but I forgot to click the reply link.
Yeah, I mean also it’s clearly going to take a lot of attention, here and in the media. Just seems sort of absurd. I guess we’re (me too) all guilty of that though, here we are writing about it.
I think the recent spate of mainstream supposedly “liberal” newspapers suddenly waving the flag of surrender to the right and appointing editors to monitor and repeat what Glenn Beck decides is the really disturbing topic of the moment, but I guess there can be more than one.
Sleeper
@Jason Bylinowski:
I dunno. It’s an alright movie I guess, maybe I’m too young or something, but I think Chinatown is just alright. It’s not bad, but I think by the time I saw it, the “my sister/my daughter” scene had been parodied enough that the original seemed a little silly. To me Polanski has always just been the notorious fugitive rather than the director.
Brachiator
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I didn’t catch any link or citation for what you wrote. Was this a judge’s formal written opinion, or some op-ed piece, which is a different thing entirely.
While this may be your personal preference, this has little to do with the criminal justice system, and for good reason. A victim might be intimidated or bribed into asking for leniency. And in cases of domestic abuse, it is not uncommon for a victim to seek to have the charges dropped, even though the odds are great that she or he will be abused again.
Prosecutions are in the name of the people, not just the victim, because the entire society has a stake in the pursuit of justice.
Comrade Luke
This is a huge gift for Congress. The media will be spending so much time on this that they’ll be distracted from health care, et al.
Good times.
Wile E. Quixote
Can we kill everyone at the Daily Kaplan? Seriously, can we just storm the place, drag them out and auto da fe every single fucking one of those bastards? I think if we did this it would have a salutary effect upon the rest of the villagers, pour encourager les autres and all that. And even if it didn’t make the other villagers behave any better it would still be a lot of fun. I mean imagine doing to David Broder, Howard Kurtz and Manne Applebaum what Eli Roth did to that Nazi in Inglourious Basterds. Would that be totally fucking awesome or what?
Jason Bylinowski
@Llelldorin: Yeah, I am acutely aware of this, due to personal history. I can agree with the philosophy of it 100 percent, while at the same time having a great empathy for the wishes of the victim. IANAL, so all this is just my personal opinion on what should or should not happen. This ain’t Talk Left, and my name is not Armando (thank God). All I’m saying is, we’ve got him on another charge, so let’s pursue that on its own merits, and if there’s ample reason to continue the original case and not have it turn into “Trial of the Century part deux: Electric Boogaloo”, that’s fine too, but I do think there should a level of discretion shown here for the wishes of the victim, who may have already been there and done that with regard to their coping with the after-effects of rape. Sometimes, it can be a good thing to poke at old wounds, but for some, it’s a horror. But I realize your argument disregards that aspect of things, and I agree with it as a standalone assessment.
Now, bedtime.
jl
@Jason Bylinowski: Oops! Chinatown was by Polanski? Now that you mention it… Wait, let me check Wikipedia. Yep, there it is. I forgot about that.
OK, look I ended up taking this modern film class, and I liked everything else OK, but thought the early Polanski films totally sucked. Bunel, Resnais, Herzog, all had something interesting. I disliked the Polanski films so much it left scars: Boring and pointless and unpleasant. Didn’t like Wenders either.
Sorry about my lapse, I give him Chinatown. That was a good film. I probably don’t want to admit to myself that he made it.
I was enough of a musiciann for a long enough time, and I have never seen a ‘musician film’ that I liked. Probably mad that they are always about sensitive misunderstood violinists and pianists who don’t have to work for a living. No woodwinds!!?? I guess I should see a jazz saxman movie sometime. Any good ones?
minachica
Wow – this 30-year-old sex crime seems to be uniting wingnuts with DFHs. Should we sing Kumbaya or Hallelujah?
jl
@minachica: I think a rousing ‘Meh’ is called for.
I agree with commenter above that this case is not worthy of dominating the news. I hope no new sensational trial or whatever happens. Very well might be a big media circus though.
Mnemosyne
@Sleeper:
The Los Angeles DA’s office — which has been actively pursuing Polanski for 31 years — is also in charge of bringing charges against the Bush administration?
Again, it’s not like this is a brand-new, out of the blue situation. The Los Angeles DA has actively pursued Polanski for 30 years and has blocked his proposed re-entry into the United States multiple times. Polanski spent all of his time in countries that refused to extradite him to the US, and he finally fucked up and got himself caught. Sorry, but I can’t cry a tear for a fugitive from justice and say that he should get a pass on fleeing the country because the judge was so mmmeeeaaaannnn to him.
He flipped us the collective bird for 30 years and we’re supposed to forgive him because he’s rich and famous and all he did was drug, rape, and sodomize a 13-year-old girl. No big deal.
That’s because Nastassja Kinski‘s parents were too fucked up to complain when their 15-year-old daughter moved out to live with Polanski.
Sleeper
@jl: I don’t even know if there’s been any federal pressure brought to bear on the Swiss to arrest the man, although considering he owns a house there and has been there many times in the past few decades, it seems weird to suddenly remember this warrant thing. And maybe I’m reading into this but this is symptomatic of how petty and idiotic our political culture is. Halliburton and Blackwater are criticized here and there by politicians, but remain on the government payroll, even after slaughtering Iraqi civilians in free-fire bloodbaths and killing American service personnel with shoddy electrical systems. There’s not even a serious move to be done with them. But ACORN? Holy fuck, We Gotta Drop Everything until this despicable conspiracy to help pimps who aren’t really pimps set up fictional brothels is dealt with. And everyone gets to stand up and bray about accountability and how the buck stops here and blah blah blah. Because ACORN has no power, because all they really do is register poor, mainly black people to vote. You don’t lose anything stomping on them because they can’t fight back, and you get to look like you’re doing something important.
This is just the same to me. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo and Addington, the CIA…man, that’s Hard Work. Too many toes to step on, too many Serious People who will take umbrage at the incivility of it all. “Torture” is such an ugly word, why bring all that up? The people who want something done about it aren’t in power, they don’t have money or government contracts, they’re not Sunday morning hosts. Where’s the percentage? Why go out on a limb when nobody important will back you up? It’s a lot easier to spend effort pursuing a 31 year old warrant for fleeing prosecution, for a creepy old man who is not a threat to anyone. This isn’t Eichmann we’re talking about after all. If the victim doesn’t want this, who does this serve besides preening prosecutors and Justice Department flacks? It’s not like they have anything better to spend their time doing, after all.
minachica
@jl:I vote for meh too
Maybe because I just watched (for the first time) Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs&feature=related
Brachiator
@jl:
And how about Rosemary’s Baby?
Try Clint Eastwood’s Bird.
Bony Baloney
Yeah, the U.S. High Command is walking around free, so the Party literally had to travel backward through time to find a white victimized teenager to distract people.
I support Polanski’s arrest. Let the word go forth from this time and place: if you surrender alive to American forces, your worst nightmares will come alive, you will be disappeared forever, so you might as well pull the pin and if people in American uniforms tell you to lie down with your hands behind your head, you’re just following orders, nicht wahr? Open your hand and let the spoon go. Why not?
Triple word score if you’re wearing a Semtex vest and squeezing a dead-man’s switch. That’s EXACTLY what this country needs at this point in time. “Surrender and live out your life in Hell, or, better to burn out than fade away?” I’m so happy that adult Vulcan chessmasters are in charge, after all these years of short-term goal seeking.
Kill the pig! Cut his throat!
Just kidding. Obviously the Swiss are doing this to embarrass us behind the banking-secrecy faux pas. Bloody good for them, too. If Treasury spent a tenth of the effort on Iraqi mongolian cluster fucks that they’ve spent on overseas tax dodgers, the world would be totally different and dinosaurs would be wearing evening dress and driving around in air cars.
jl
@Sleeper: I agree with most of what you say. But as commenter said above, this is a state justice system matter, and the state is taking care of its business like the feds should, but don’t. Maybe the feds can learn a thing or two. The feds have taken care of Madoff. Maybe this will teach them that they can pursue justice until statute of limiations runs out, even if things slip their fingers the first try.
Baby steps, baby steps, in making the rich and famous obey the laws that we do.
Mnemosyne
@Sleeper:
Why did we bother to pursue Alex Kelly or Andrew Luster then? I mean, hey, they’d fled to other countries, so they weren’t our problem anymore. They weren’t a danger to American women anymore. Why spend all that money tracking them down and bringing them back to the US?
The issue is that people should be punished if they decide to skip out on their trial and/or sentencing because it’s a bad idea to let rich people treat their felony sentences as optional. Yes, even old, rich people should not be allowed to skip bail and then come back into the country because they’re real sorry and it’s been a long time since that happened.
jl
@Brachiator: Sorry, I didn’t like Rosemary’s Baby. I think the only film of Polanski’s that I saw and liked was Chinatown.
Check, Bird. I will keep that in mind. Thanks.
bago
So Auto de fe is strongly linked to self-immolation?
Yutsano
@Bony Baloney: I can’t tell if that’s brilliant spoof or if I want what you’re on.
BTW is it just me or is Word Press about to freak out again?
Sleeper
@Mnemosyne:
No, but the LA DA’s office can’t pressure the Swiss government to out of the blue arrest someone who’s been in and out of their country for 30 years, and who owns a house there. There has been an international arrest warrant for him since 2005, and when our government learned Polanski would be in Switzerland they contacted the Swiss government and negotiated with/pressured them to make the arrest. Why? After 27 years of living abroad did Polanski suddenly become a threat to America? At this point, if Polanski were to return to America, sure, arrest him. But to set up an ambush for him in another country? THIS is what they waste their time doing instead of investigating Halliburton, investigating contractor fraud in New Orleans, investigating the banks and credit rating companies? THIS is a priority for them? To me, the idea that with all the problems going on, that anyone from the federal government is wasting a moment on this is just stupid.
It’s like the Justice Department wasting time defending DOMA, a law the President states he wants repealed, from legal challenge. What is the point of that? What a complete waste of time and resources.
I said nothing about feeling sorry for the man, giving him a hug, condoning what he did or pretending it didn’t happen. You’re reading some kind of defense of the man’s actions into my comments, a sentiment which is not there.
bago
Alright, how many olds are out here? I try and reference the dubstep idm movement out of san fran and I get nothing. People talk about mix tapes (seriously, iron on plastic tapes?) as if they are modern. Sully might be culturally relevant because he’s gay, but he knows that this is the new shit to paraphrase a certain Manson.
Arguing about the dead is so… old when compared to the conversations regarding remixing and sampling. Taking a song and dub-breaking it, much to the objection of the old dub stoners, the original artists, and the idm geeks.
(Granted, these are the opinions of a Seattle kid who regularly ventures to San Fran to stay up to date on the music scene).
But seriously, if you have heard the original Halcyon, and then hear this mix, how can you not appreciate the dynamism?
bago
Now this is what I’m talkin about. Lay that Synth down!
Sleeper
@Mnemosyne:
?? Where did I say that Polanski should be allowed back in America with no consequences? I never said that. If he tried to re-enter he’d be detained automatically, I have no problem with that.
bago
If you’re listening to this on a < 100 watt system, you are missing the point. Everyone needs to feel a fatty ass bassline fill the room.
Bony Baloney
None dare call it spoof. And it’s been years since I felt that old feeling just outside Barstow. What a bizarre trip, the real world, waking up and going to sleep every day. I seriously wonder what kind of freak-out people go through these days. It must be confusing as hell, or maybe nobody notices.
Lupin
I’ve seen the HBO documentary but like Atrios I don’t feel I know enough about the minutiae of the case to have a strong opinion about it.
Speaking as a former CA resident, one thing I do know, however, is that purely because of budget cuts, prison overcrowding, etc, we are about to release 43,000 inmates over the next two years. (Google it up.)
So what the fuck are we doing here?
TenguPhule
Stop tempting me.
TenguPhule
Hang them all.
Napoleon
Fuck Anne Applebaum
Napoleon
By the way, I got part of the way through the comments and saw someone bring up that the court may have/was suspected to be considering “breaking” the plea agreement.
Courts simply are not bound by plea agreements. The agreement is with the prosecutor, not the judge, and the agreements simply are that the prosecutor will only seek, and will recommend to the court a certain sentence. The court need not follow that recommendation.
Grendel72
Polanski is obviously not a threat to any other American children
The man has a history of inappropriate sexual relations with underage girls.
Personally, I find all the sympathy for a child rapist coming from media sources disgusting. What are we telling every thirteen year-old watching this story? What are we telling creepy old men with the wealth to evade justice?
There is a victim here, and it sure as fuck isn’t Polanski despite what he and his supporters claim.
Grendel72
And really, I hope people citing the victim’s wish for this to be dropped are just being disingenuous and don’t actually lack the understanding of why she would prefer to drop the issue.
Anonymous visitor from Sadly,No!
Update. Poland is interceding on Polanski’s behalf. Their foreign minister…Anne Applebaum’s husband.
Would this be the same right-wing Polish government that is meanwhile trying to impose mandatory chemical castration for paedophilia?
SiubhanDuinne
Applebaum should not only have disclosed her marriage to the Polish foreign minister who is actively lobbying for Polanski’s release — she should have recused herself altogether from opining on this story. Just outrageous. She should be fired from this gig and blackballed by all other respectable (heh) media outlets.
Oh also, if we’re going to commit havoc on everyone at the Daily Kaplan, though, could we give Eugene Robinson a heads-up? I like Gene :-)
Sleeper
@Grendel72:
Most of the criticism I see about this is over whatever legal issues there might be, not because what he did wasn’t so bad or that it was acceptable. I haven’t heard anyone even try to argue that one. I certainly don’t feel that way about what he did.
And the victim’s wishes to drop the matter are, I’m sure, mostly about her not wanting to be fucking reminded of it every time the case is mentioned. That’s not really relevant, if one is inclined to take her wishes into consideration it doesn’t matter why she wishes that. Either you choose to give her wishes consideration or you don’t. There are cases to be made for both sides, not sure where I fall on that one.
Sleeper
@Napoleon:
The allegations, though, are that while the prosecutor assigned to the case and the defense were working out the plea agreement, other higher-ranking prosecutors were pressuring and persuading the judge to ignore the plea bargain so they could nail a famous Hollywood director. If the state is going to plea bargain like that, it has to do it in good faith, it can’t make promises that it has no intention of keeping and work to screw the defendant out of a trial.
This whole mess would have been avoided if they had simply went to trial. I’m not really sure what motivated them to offer Polanski a deal, other than a weak case. Not a lawyer so I can’t say.
Napoleon
@Sleeper:
Sleeper said: “Most of the criticism I see about this is over whatever legal issues there might be, not because what he did wasn’t so bad or that it was acceptable. I haven’t heard anyone even try to argue that one. I certainly don’t feel that way about what he did.”
He plead guilty, so there are no longer “legal issues” and the people raising them are using them as a smoke screen in there attempt to get one of their fellow elites off from diddling a child.
kay
I think the column is perfectly consistent with the Post’s attitude toward any act, criminal or otherwise. The law equitably applied to what actually happened doesn’t matter, or is an after-thought.
It’s who did the act and the writers feelings about the act that matter.
When you’re completely untethered from the rules, and just making arbitrary assessments of relative worth, and guilt, and innocence, and adding your own personal mitigating factors, this is inevitable.
She’s the judge and jury. She’s not “in favor” of applying the law to this person. Guilt or innocence aren’t the purview of judges and juries. They’re a matter of opinion.
Napoleon
@Sleeper:
I honestly do not know the details, but if he has a beef with the court raise them with the court, but he is not entitled to a free pass and in any event he committed a seperate crime in fleeing.
@kay:
Exactly, but I would expand it to cover the Village’s thinking in general.
Redhand
Fu*k ’em. He had sex with a 13 year old girl. There should be no statute of limitations on that.
kay
She doesn’t have to follow the rules either, apparently. Did she have any ethical qualms writing this column, considering she has such a huge and glaring conflict?
Nah. She knows her heart is pure, and that’s enough.
Judge and jury.
Persia
@jl:
Thank you. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, I can want to prosecute war criminals and child rapists who flee from the law because they have the money and access to do it. (Don’t think that if this was some shmoe from the flyover states we’d even be having this discussion, much less a black guy.)
kay
@Napoleon:
He’s getting elaborate process. Three separate hearings on extradition alone. The Washington Post don’t really have to wring their hands over the injustice here.
It’s not like he was snatched off the street without a warrant, blindfolded, flown thousands of miles away and deposited in permanent detention.
Comrade Darkness
@Sleeper: Um, your statement can be summarized as: because other well connected people get to dodge justice, they all should And because it’s expensive. (Although, it’s about five minutes in Iraq worth of $) Setting more bad precedent does not like it will improve things, to me.
Mnemosyne
@Sleeper:
So, again, your position is that if people have the money and access to flee the country to escape justice, we shouldn’t pursue them because they’re not our problem anymore. They should only be arrested if they try to come back.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I say Polanksi got away with rape for 40 years, and I have no sympathy whatever for the man. He needs to spend the rest of his natural life in prison, preferably learning the dark side of the golden rule.
BigSwami
The only people I can imagine defending him are the ruling class. Rape is rape. What he did was heinous, and he deserves prosecution for, if nothing else*, flouting the rule of law.
* Actually plenty else
Corner Stone
@jl: DFH.
Hacktacular
I think Polanski is the O.J. for the white upper-crust. If only he had won an Oscar for his role as Nordberg, he may have been able to earn their sympathies.
Person of Choler
Too bad for Polanski that there was not available for his amusement a community-organized brothel staffed with 13 and 14 year old imported Honduran girls.
He’d probably be getting NEA grant award notices today instead of extradition papers.
Morbo
Man alive, the Polanski thread on CT is such a cesspool of elitist apologia. The commenters have really taken the civility dodge to heart. “Check it out. No way I’m playing defense in discourse this vile.” was my personal favorite. And one of Turley’s commenters called Polanski’s victim his “partner;” that one made me want to barf.
Bill Jones
child rapists are among the very few classes of people who should be in jail.
Wile E. Quixote
I’ll bet that Phillip Garrido is wishing that he were a Polack art-film director so that he could be getting some love from Manne Applebaum.
Don
The solution to that problem is to quit jailing drug offenders, not to shrug off child-diddlers.
Sleeper
@Mnemosyne:
I think getting the State and Justice Departments involved in negotiating with other countries in order pursue a 31-year-old case that was going to give the defendant, what, another few weeks in jail I think it was, when the defendant has not been charged with other crimes since then, when he’s not going to be pose a threat to American minors now, and where the victim would rather it be dropped, is a huge waste of time. That’s my position.
Mnemosyne
@Sleeper:
That’s what the problem is. You think he’s being punished for his original crime. He’s not. He’s being punished for fleeing the country after being convicted of his crime.
It’s like being in a car accident. Leaving the scene of an accident is a more serious charge than just about any other that you can get, because people who try to evade the law need to be punished.
I have to say, it’s pretty amusing to see someone in the same breath complain that the Bush administration has evaded responsibility for their actions and that Polanski should be allowed to evade responsibility for his actions. Do you think that maybe actions like Polanski’s where he publicly demonstrated his belief that his fame and riches made him above the law just might have something in common with the Bush administration’s belief that their power and riches make them above the law?
The law is for little people. That’s what you’re arguing.
Wile E. Quixote
I’d love to see Faux News pick this up. I can just see the tagline “Liberal newspaper defends rapist pedophile”. I can dream, can’t I?
Mnemosyne
Turns out that Polanski’s lawyers did some filings this summer and said that the charges should be dropped because the prosecution wasn’t actively trying to have Polanski extradited.
You’d think that defense attorneys would know better than to deliberately piss off the prosecutors, but apparently not.
Catsy
This.
I’ve got no truck for Polanski or what he did. The man is an admitted rapist and pedophile–he specifically sought out that girl for a photo shoot, and while there gave her drugs and alcohol and raped her. There is no defending that, and nothing he’s done since changes or mitigates that–and it sickens me seeing so many people trying to minimize the crime in his defense.
With that said, I also have no moral objection to his fleeing. Our system of justice absolutely depends on plea bargains–we simply do not have the resources to bring every single criminal case through a full trial. This mechanism, however, relies on an unspoken social compact between defendants and the justice system. If defendants trust that the judge and prosecution will honor the bargain and not deviate significantly from its terms, they are more likely to view that option as better than taking their chances at trial. This saves society untold amounts of time and money prosecuting fairly straightforward cases.
But if the idea that plea bargains cannot be trusted ever embeds itself into our national consciousness, we will be deeply sorry–and judges and prosecutors who routinely violate the terms of plea bargains should be stomped hard for professional misconduct. Without plea bargains, the justice system would grind to a halt, and fixing that broken social contract would be a lengthy and expensive task, if possible at all–look at the way the War on Some Drugs has bred distrust for police and contempt for the law.
Put another way: it doesn’t matter what the crime was, or if I even did it or not. If I entered a plea bargain, and the state blatantly reneged on it, as far as I’m concerned the state has irrevocably severed its social contract with me, and in the process relieved me of any moral obligation to in turn honor that broken social contract by continuing to abide by the terms of my release and plea bargain. My legal obligations are another matter–but at that point my sense of moral obligation to uphold the law has ceased to be, and doing so becomes a pragmatic concern rather than a moral or ethical one.
Now, being that I am not and will never be as rich and connected as Polanski, from that strictly pragmatic point of view I would not flee, simply because the chances of successfully eluding capture and living any kind of a life ever again would be statistically insignificant. But from a moral and ethical standpoint: no. If the state breaks it social contract with me, that works both ways.
It is for that reason that despite the fact that I think Polanski is the scum of the earth and deserves to do hard time for the crime he committed, I am torn about his extradition: on the one hand, I don’t fault him for fleeing and I don’t want to see this kind of judicial misconduct rewarded. On the other hand, the scumbag judge who did this is long dead, and at this point I think the best way to bring sunlight to his misconduct and set a precedent for punishing it is for Polanski to return to the States and seek to overturn the conviction on those grounds.
On the gripping hand, the chances of him successfully defending himself in court are pretty slim–mainly due to his own actions–so perhaps he’s better off fighting the extradition after all.
Mnemosyne
Here’s the problem with that and the part that Polanski’s defenders always seem to leave out — the judge appears to have made that decision after reading the report he got regarding Polanski’s psychiatric evaluation. Is the judge never allowed to make a change based on new evidence, or is the plea bargain always sacrosanct and if anything new comes out, well, too bad?
Catsy
One can be forgiven for skipping my first paragraph and mistaking my comment for a defense of Polanski.
I’m not “leaving out” anything–your opinion that the judge reneged on the plea bargain because of new evidence in the psychiatric evaluation is pure speculation. It does not stand against the considerable weight of evidence that the judge was improperly influenced to renege on the bargain. In the words of Judge Peter Espinoza, who viewed said evidence in the most recent filing, “[i]t’s hard to contest some of the behavior in the documentary was misconduct.”
Judges must have latitude to consider new evidence and utilize their own, well, judgment–which is why reneging on the terms of a plea deal is not outright prohibited. But doing so must be weighed against the harm to society that results from a loss of faith in the state’s willingness to uphold its social contract. If that is actually what happened, I have no problem with watching Polanski go back to jail. But there is no evidence that this is the case, and considerable evidence that it was not, so while your point is valid, it really doesn’t have anything to do with Polanski.
It is also not really germane to my larger point. As I believe I said, “judges and prosecutors who routinely violate the terms of plea bargains should be stomped hard for professional misconduct”. I have emphasized the key word here: “routinely”. A judge who changes the terms of a plea only in response to new evidence that clearly warrants it should not develop such a record, although in my opinion if new evidence is presented that would cause the judge to change the terms of a plea bargain, the plea ought to be vacated and a new one negotiated. Otherwise there is nothing to stop an unethical judge and prosecutor–such as in the Polanski case–from pulling a bait-and-switch to get someone to plead guilty, then drop the book on them.
In fact, that social contract that I mentioned–the unspoken understanding that the terms of plea bargains, if not sacrosanct, are at least not lightly ignored–is really the only thing that does stand in the way of that kind of bait-and-switch tactic, which occurs far more often than it ought to. If that trust fails, we will all of us regret it.
Catsy
An analogy just occurred to me: consider the current political climate, and the deadlock in Congress due to Republican and Blue Dog obstructionism.
This is almost entirely the result of politicians ignoring longstanding traditions and (in the Senate context) social contracts, trampling their spirit while hewing narrowly to the letter of the law–specifically, but not exclusively, the abuse of the filibuster. And while what they are doing is perfectly valid within the scope of Senate rules, it is absolutely destructive to the network of unspoken rules of conduct that allow the institution to function at all. The unwritten agreement not to abuse the filibuster is the only thing that keeps the threshold for passage of all bills from being effectively 60 votes rather than 50–and we are now seeing the consequences of what happens when one party to such a social contract decides to start ignoring it.
A similar dynamic occurred with the way the Bush administration routinely ignored the law and court orders. The common thread running through Polanski’s case and all of these things is that when a party decides to start ignoring unwritten social agreements that allow various parts of society to function, it throws sand in the gears of society. If these unwritten rules and traditions are flouted widely enough, and enough people begin to think that they no longer apply, the entire mechanism breaks down.
Mnemosyne
Honestly, I don’t think the actual evidence is quite as strong as the documentary claimed, so it’s hard for me to accept that the sole reason the judge and prosecutor decided to change the plea agreement was because of corruption and not because of the psychiatric report. The documentary was very deliberately slanted to make Polanski look better, so while the case bears some investigation, taking its word on the plea agreement would be like watching Kurt & Courtney and citing that as proof that Courtney Love put a hit on Kurt Cobain.
It’s possible that there was corruption. Polanski has had 30 years to present his proof of that and no one seems to have been terribly impressed by it except the filmmakers and the people who’ve watched their take on it in the film. That makes me a little suspicious of the film.
Again, I agree with you in principle, but I wouldn’t stake my reputation on this case. Considering how much misinformation the Polanski side has put out over the years (like claiming it was consensual even though he drugged, raped and sodomized her), I would need to see quite a bit more evidence that he was framed or otherwise abused by the system before I agree with you that he was right to flee the country and thumb his nose at the American justice system for 30 years.
Catsy
Thankfully I am not relying on the word of Polanski or his attorneys, nor on the slant of the documentary–only the words of the man who prosecuted the case and the others involved who were interviewed in the process of making the documentary. No one alive who was directly involved with the case disagrees that the actions of the judge and prosecutor were improper.
I appreciate that you are erring on the side of upholding the law here, and I don’t necessarily disagree with the overall point you’re making–it just doesn’t apply to this case, and I don’t think you’ve sufficiently informed yourself about the details to keep asserting otherwise, because you keep presenting doubts about the evidence of misconduct that seem to be based on unfamiliarity with the facts, not informed skepticism.
You keep presenting this as a case of he-said-she-said where we have no way of knowing who’s telling the truth. But when the defense attorney and prosecutor who worked that case with that judge feel compelled to put out a joint statement affirming the accuracy of the documentary in which they were quoted in order to correct the LA Superior Court, asserting that “Judge Rittenband’s conduct in handling the case [was] accurately captured in the documentary”, it’s a foregone conclusion that something was rotten in the process. How many times have you seen a prosecutor go public with an accusation of misconduct against a judge on a case they worked? Polanski’s former attorney has a conflict of interest, but there is nothing Gunson–a straight-laced Mormon DA with a stellar career–gains from misrepresenting the facts in favor of the defendant.
So yeah. I’ve got no problem staking my reputation, as it were, on the exhaustively-documented misconduct of Judge Rittenband. In the grand scheme of things, much as I’d like to see Polanski rot for what he unquestionably did, discouraging that kind of systemic misconduct ranks above punishing any one criminal–the former is far more corrosive to society.