KRAKOW, Poland — A judge in Poland on Friday turned down a request by the
United States for the extradition of the filmmaker Roman Polanski, who is
wanted over a 1977 conviction for having sex with a 13-year-old girl.
At a hearing in Krakow, Judge Dariusz Mazur
ruled that turning over Mr. Polanski would be an “obviously unlawful”
deprivation of liberty, and he added that California was unlikely to be ready
to humanely incarcerate the 82-year-old filmmaker, given his age.
Mr. Polanski, a citizen of France and Poland,
has been working on a film in Poland about Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who was
wrongly convicted of spying for Germany in 1894. He was in Krakow on Friday,
but he did not appear at the hearing, the latest chapter in a 38-year
trans-Atlantic legal controversy.
Over the years, prosecutors and judges in Los
Angeles have said that Mr. Polanski must return to the United States to face
sentencing. His lawyers have asserted that improprieties by the trial judge —
now deceased — and others had violated his legal rights.
Judge Mazur sided with Mr. Polanski’s lawyers.
“I’m terrified by the statements of some of my colleagues in the U.S.,” he
said, citing an account last year that a Los Angeles judge thought Mr.
Polanski should “cool his heels in jail” if he returned to the United States
under a proposed deal in which the authorities would agree that the filmmaker
had already served his punishment. (The deal did not happen.)
“If I were to behave like them, I’d lose the
respect of all my subordinates here,” Judge Mazur said. “I do not find any
logical, rational explanation as to why the U.S. is pursuing the extradition.”
Judge Mazur’s ruling is not necessarily the
final step in the Polish case; prosecutors could appeal. “We will wait until we
get the full decision in writing before deciding whether to appeal,” the
regional prosecutor, Danuta Bieniarz, told journalists after the ruling.
(Complicating the matter, an influential politician in the right-wing party
that took the most votes in parliamentary elections on Sunday, Mariusz Blaszczak, has expressed
sympathy for the American position.)
A lawyer for Mr. Polanski, Jan Olszewski, had
argued passionately against the extradition request, which American authorities made to the Polish government in January. “The victim in this case did not want jail
time for Polanski,” Mr. Olszewski said. “She forgave him. This is rare in this
kind of case.”
He added: “This is not a matter of justice. This
is not about the victim. She said that the whole proceeding has harmed her more
than what Mr. Polanski did to her.”
Mr. Olszweski and another defense lawyer, Jerzy
Stachowicz, repeatedly cited the 2008 documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” which suggested prosecutorial overreach and
judicial misconduct in the United States. They argued that extraditing Mr.
Polanski would violate the European Convention on Human Rights and his right to
a fair trial.
In contrast, Ms. Bieniarz, the prosecutor, kept
her argument brief. “In our opinion, there are no legal grounds to stop the
extradition,” she told Judge Mazur. “The case has not expired under American
law, and we do not think that the extradition is unlawful, on the basis of
Polish law. There is no proof that Polanski will be treated inhumanely in the
United States.”
Representatives of the Los Angeles County
district attorney’s office and court system did not immediately respond to
requests for comment on Friday, nor did Mr. Polanski.
The legal decision in Poland follows Switzerland’s refusal in 2010 to extradite Mr. Polanski. He had been
arrested at the Zurich airport and held for about 10 months during a series of
hearings similar to the ones in Poland.
In Switzerland, the authorities said that they
had not been given enough information about the case to justify sending Mr.
Polanski to the United States for sentencing. They pointed in particular to a
failure by officials in Los Angeles to forward sealed testimony by Roger
Gunson, a now-retired lawyer who had originally prosecuted the case.
Mr. Gunson gave provisional testimony in 2009,
when he was gravely ill, about a plan by the trial judge, Laurence J.
Rittenband, to limit Mr. Polanski’s sentence to a 90-day psychiatric
evaluation, a portion of which Mr. Polanski served in Chino State Prison. Mr.
Gunson’s account also was not provided to the Polish court.
Mr. Gunson is still alive, and the testimony has
not been unsealed. Judge Rittenband died in 1993.
Mr. Polanski was first arrested in 1977 on
charges that included the rape of a 13-year-old girl at the home of the actor
Jack Nicholson. In 1978, he fled the United States on the eve of sentencing
under an agreement by which he was to plead guilty to a count of statutory
rape.
Mr. Polanski abruptly left the country after
learning that Judge Rittenband would revise his plan to limit his sentence.
The victim in the case for which Mr. Polanski
was convicted, Samantha Geimer, who revisited the legal proceedings in a 2013 memoir, wrote on her Facebook page on Friday: “If they were smart, they’d
stop trying to bring him back. If they ever do, the truth about the corruption
in the D.A.’s office and court will finally be known.”
In December, Judge James R. Brandlin of the Los
Angeles County Superior Court dismissed a motion in which Alan M. Dershowitz, who then represented Mr. Polanski, argued that
prosecutors had provided false information to the Swiss authorities. The motion
also cited internal court emails that Mr. Dershowitz contended were evidence
that a Superior Court judge in 2009 unethically prejudged issues related to the
case.
In 2009, a California appeals court panel suggested that Mr. Polanski could be sentenced in absentia, opening the way to possible resolution of the
long-running standoff. But that suggestion was rejected by the Superior Court.
Mr. Polanski is now represented in the United
States by Harland W. Braun, a defense attorney whose celebrity clients have
included the actors Robert Blake, Gary Busey and Roseanne Barr. After the
retirement of Mr. Polanski’s longtime lawyer, Douglas Dalton, Mr. Braun was
recruited for the job by the Hollywood filmmaker and power broker Brett Ratner.
Since 2012, Mr. Polanski has talked of directing
a film about Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, whose 1894
trial for treason caused political scandal. Mr. Polanski has said he views the
film, of which Mr. Ratner is a producer and an investor, as a way to teach
lessons about official misbehavior.
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