<p>Mantori.suzuki, I get what you’re saying and respect it, but some of us are having trouble separating a 13-year old being drugged and sodomized into a philosophical argument. I would gut the man with a fish knife who plied my young teenager with drugs and alcohol, never mind what I’d do to a man who forcibly raped and sodomized her. It’s a pretty heinous crime and, if ever pitchforks were warranted, this would be one time. It’s also partly Mr. Polanski’s fault that he’s in this position. He didn’t need to be so provocative in his dealings with the court and the prosecutor in the immediate past.</p>
<p>I think that post #138 misrepresents the facts. </p>
<p>First, in reply to the same poster as #138, the age of consent in California is 18–and has been since 1913. Before that it was 16. Apparently, someone who knows zilch wrote in the Huffington Post that the age was 14 and a lot of folks assumed–incorrectly–that the author knew what she was talking about. </p>
<p>Second, there is a difference between the criminal justice system and a civil action. Lets say someone drives drunk, hits someone with his vehicle killing him, leaves the scene of the accident, but is caught. The fact that the victim’s family sues the driver and settles the case (probably for the limits of the insurance policy) doesn’t mean that the driver can’t be prosecuted CRIMINALLY for driving drunk, vehicular manslaughter, and leaving the scene of an accident. </p>
<p>The victim’s suit against Polanski is wholly separate from the criminal matter. It is NOT a matter of having been “detained, released, sued and paid.” The suit and settlement are completely separate from the criminal action. </p>
<p>I’m not admitted to practice in California, and I don’t do criminal law. However, in my state, you do NOT plea bargain with the judge. You may, as here, be offered a chance to plead guilty to a lesser charge than the one you were originally indicted for. Polanski might have been found guilty of forcible rape in the first degree. If convicted of that crime, he could have gone to prison for the rest of his life. </p>
<p>Polanski plead guilty to something else–I forget the specifics, but it wasn’t the original chage. The prosecutor accepted that plea and RECOMMENDED that Polanski be sentenced to the time he had already spent in some sort of psychiatric facililty for an evaluation as part of the plea bargain.</p>
<p>The deal was with the DA’s office, NOT the judge. In my state, the DA can NOT sentence you, only a judge can-and it works both ways. Sometimes, a judge will impose a LESSER sentence than the DA recommends. In this case, someone who was NOT involved in the prosecution talked to the judge and expressed the opinion that the sentence was outrageously lenient. The defense counsel was not informed of these communications and was not given the opportunity to respond. That violated the rules of conduct for judges in California. If proven, as others have said, it just would mean that Polanski would have a different judge sentence him–or at least that’s would happen in some other states. </p>
<p>WHILE OUT ON BAIL AWAITING SENTENCING, Polanski got worried that he was going to end up in prison, and so he fled the US. He has dual Polish and French citizenship. Knowing that it’s French law that it will NOT extradict its citizens to the US for the crime he committed, he took off for France. </p>
<p>Thirty years later, he went to Switzerland, where he is not a citizen. Having heard of the planned trip, the US made a request that he be arrested there. He was. </p>
<p>The French SHOULD know the “real reason” he was arrested. It is because he set foot in a nation which is willing to extradict him for a crime committed in the US and gave such public notice of his plans that the US government had a chance to make the request. The same thing would have happened if he’d gone to the UK–but Polanski realized that and never set foot there. The SAME thing would happen to any other French citizen who committed a crime in the US and gave advance notice that he was going to go to a nation which would agree to detain him. He can now argue in a Swiss court that he should not be extradicted to the US–and he may win that action. </p>
<p>Polanski didn’t flea the US because he was afraid of being deported–he effectively deported himself. He left while he was awaiting sentencing and was afraid of going to prison. I’ve heard rumors that some people in prison do some not so nice things to rich men who rape teenagers–maybe Polanski heard some of the same rumors. </p>
<p>IMO–for a lot of reasons-- he belongs in prison. Essentially, the French think he shouldn’t go to prison in the US because he’s French–and it protects its citizens against being extradicted to the US. </p>
<p>Your analogy re the border crossings isn’t valid. This would be as if those who crossed the border were convicted in the nations involved. Then they fled to the US before going to prison and we refused to return them. They then visited another nation friendly to the one in which they had trespassed and were detained by that other nation at the request of the government of the nation in which they trespassed. </p>
<p>Your analogy would work only if at the time he was arrested for the rape, he had sought the intervention of the French government to ARRANGE his deportation to France. That didn’t happen.</p>
<p>Gee, I must have had the word “case” on my mind while typing that last post! </p>
<p>mantori - I have no problem with discussing these issues and certainly find some of them interesting to think about in the abstract. However, I also have no problem in saying that none of that has anything to do with what should happen here.</p>
<p>According to the Los Angeles Times, he could possibly withdraw his guilty plea to the plea bargain charge and go to trial for the original charges (no double indemnity, I guess, since he was never tried on those charges.) Since it seems clear, based on all her statements, that the victim would not testify, it would be a bigger challenge for the prosecution to win although not impossible.</p>
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<p>So would I. In fact, I might even hope he escaped conviction, just so I’d have an opportunity to deal with him in various creative ways myself. (I have a 10-year-old daughter.)</p>
<p>Then bring him back, and give him life in an American jail for breaking the law on American soil. But at the same time, don’t go rescued Americans who break the law on foreign soil. They should also be punished according to the law of the country in which they committed a crime, and not being rescued by politicians. We all agreed that the crime Polansky committed is disturbing according to our values, I guess the French don’t think so. In the case of the 2 journalists, it is obvious that we all agreed that 20 years of hard labor for crossing a border illegally is ridiculous, but Koreans don’t think so. I see the double standard, and it bother me.</p>
<p>Yes! It’s the double standard that’s most bothersome. American exceptionalism—here, the belief that applying our laws to visiting foreigners is just, but applying their laws to us when we visit their countries is unfair—is why the rest of the world finds us to be so annoyingly arrogant. Basically, we want to be held to their standards only when their standards happen to be the same as ours. Otherwise we want the US Embassy to come to our rescue. It’s no wonder we’re seen as the world’s spoiled brats.</p>
<p>I, too, have children, and I don’t know what I would have done if something like that had happened to one of them. At the same time, I would never had my D hanging out alone with 40 years old men, never. Gosh, I have never let my daughter babysitting because I noticed the trend of the men being the one driving those teenagers home at the end of the night, and was not comfortable with the idea.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that people are even talking about “the age of consent” in relation to this case since the girl did not actually consent to being drugged, and raped and sodomized. Read the testimony. Imagine it as a 27 year old woman and it is still rape, which is still a crime and was even a crime thirty years ago, strange as that may seem to those in Hollywood. When you add in the fact that she was 13? Yeah, I’m pretty much in the “off with his head” crowd on this one.</p>
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<p>As you can see, we have made the same point here. So, I’m not saying that his head shouldn’t come off, as it were. But do we really need a (now) 150-post thread in which everyone shouts, “Off with his head?” Is the purpose of this thread just to give everyone an opportunity to say that they think drugging women to have sex with them is wrong? I’d like to think that we can move beyond the obvious and dig a little deeper.</p>
<p>This is slightly off the subject, but how many of you guys have seen his movie Tess? Probably the best photographed movie of all times?</p>
<p>I saw Tess. I didn’t know that was his film or know of his relationship with Natasha K until this week.</p>
<p>I don’t think this thread is just people saying “off with his head.” I think people have discussed cross-cultural standards, the disconnect between Hollywood and the rest of America, what really happened back in the 70s, parental responsibility, the distinction between the life events a person experiences and the choices he or she makes, speculation about how this will play out legally in the coming months and much more.</p>
<p>I read elsewhere an intriguing thought: If Roman Polanski were Father Polanski (of no fame), and had raped a 13 yo boy and then fled to Europe, how would people be feeling.</p>
<p>eucalyptus2 , I get the double standard thing when it comes to the hikers in Iran , or the reporters. I don’t feel that sorry for hikers that drifted into Iran. I think they were kind of irresponsible to be there in the first place. There are plenty of places to hike in the world , outside of war zones and hostile countries towards the US.</p>
<p>pizzagirl - If Polansky had been Father Polansky, he would not have had to flee to France. The Church would have paid a huge settlement, and Father Polansky would have been transferred to another church in a small community in the middle of nowhere.</p>
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<p>Your teenage D has never been alone with an uncle, family friend, or grandfather for even a minute? Has never been over a girlfriend’s house where just the father and not the mother was home? I don’t believe it. You can’t spend your life paranoid like that.</p>
<p>As a mom, I know I’ve made mistakes. Thus far, I’ve been lucky that none has been life-altering, but at some level that’s just by the grace of God. I wouldn’t judge another mother who made a one-time mistake (although I do wonder if she was so eager for stardom and contact with stars that her good sense went by the wayside), but forcible rape, sodomy and drugging of a child isn’t an error in judgment, it’s a willful violation of another human being. So I hold Polanski completely responsible. There’s no mistake a mom could make, no screwed up priorities, that could justify what happened to the daughter.</p>
<p>Exactly. It doesn’t really matter whether the mother left her there for the night and said to Polanski, “She’s yours. Take her.” He was an adult. She was a child. He had no right to do anything to her. Period. Full stop. I find the emphasis on the mother completely ill-placed and shocking, frankly, and it’s one step above blame-the-victim. Even if the mother used poor judgment, so WHAT? Men can’t help themselves when faced with 13 yo temptresses, so it’s women’s responsibility to provide guardians for their 13 yo D’s at all times? I’m disgusted by any discussion of the mother.</p>
<p>I have no problem with people criticizing the mother, but I don’t think it has any bearing on Polanski’s culpability, unless she tricked him into thinking her daughter was over 18.
And I’m not sure I understand the complaints about American exceptionalism. It’s not like we sent Navy Seals to abduct Polanski and bring him back–rather, US prosecutors used proper international channels to seek extradition. Would anybody be moaning about this if it were somebody non-famous who had fled after stealing a lot of money? And as others have indicated, it was Polanski who woke up the sleeping dog by trying to get the charges dropped. And while it may have been politically advantageous to the Swiss to arrest him, I’m not aware of any political reason for the US prosecutors to ask for his arrest.</p>