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Polish court rejects US request to extradite Roman Polanski Polish court rejects US request to extradite Roman Polanski
(about 2 hours later)
A Polish court has rejected a US extradition request for the film director Roman Polanski over his child sex conviction. The film-maker Roman Polanski has survived the latest round in his battle to avoid extradition to the United States over a 1977 child sex abuse conviction, after a Polish court rejected a US application.
“[Polanski’s] extradition is inadmissible,” said Judge Dariusz Mazur at the district court in the southern city of Krakow. The decision is not legally binding, as prosecutors can appeal. Judge Dariusz Mazur, at Krakow district court, said he accepted claims from Polanski’s lawyers that the application was in breach of the European convention on human rights because Polanski has admitted guilt and served a prison sentence for the offence. The case is open to appeal.
The Oscar-winning director pleaded guilty in 1977 to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl during a photo shoot in Los Angeles fuelled by champagne and drugs. Polanski was not in court to hear the decision, but his lawyer, Jan Olszewski, said: “This is a European victory. The Americans breached seven or eight paragraphs of the European convention which, among other things, protects Europeans from being prosecuted twice for the same crime.’’
He served 42 days in jail as part of a 90-day plea bargain, but fled the country for France the following year, believing that the judge hearing his case could overrule the deal and impose a longer prison sentence. Olszewski said that while the US had tried to get Switzerland to deport Polanski in 2009, and failed, Friday’s ruling in Poland marked the first time the extradition application had been considered by a court where EU law could be cited.
Polanski has been in Poland to shoot a new drama about the Dreyfus affair, based on a novel by Robert Harris. The 82-year-old was born in France but grew up in Poland and holds dual nationality. Mazur said the French-Polish film-maker had spent a year under house arrest in the Alps while waiting for the Swiss decision in 2009. “This time counts as an added prison sentence,’’ he said.
While French law forbids extradition of its citizens, Polish law does not. Polanski’s lawyers had been trying to strike a deal giving him immunity from legal action while he shot in Krakow. He criticised the US authorities’ persistence in the case, saying: “Where is the sound reasoning? Sound reasoning does not find an answer.”
Mazur said the case was very complicated, but an extradition procedure would violate Polanski’s human rights because he could be subjected to confinement. Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to having unlawful sex with Samantha Galley, 13, during a photo shoot in Hollywood fuelled by champagne and drugs. He was initially indicted on six felony counts, including rape by the use of drugs, child molesting and sodomy. But as a result of a plea bargain he pleaded guilty to only one count of unlawful sex with a minor. He served 42 days in jail. Believing the sentencing judge might overrule the deal and impose a long jail term, he fled to France in February 1978.
The director’s lawyer Jan Olszewski argued on Friday that the US request had legal flaws. “This is not about justice or the interest of the victim,” Olszewski said. The Krakow decision will come as a relief for the incoming Polish government. In campaigning ahead of the 25 October election, officials of the national-conservative Law & Justice party pledged that if the Krakow court granted the US request, its incoming justice minister would rubberstamp the agreement as a mark of its disapproval of sex with minors. But Polanski is one of Poland’s most revered living people and his extradition would be unpopular.
Polanski previously appeared in a Polish court in February. The judge presiding over that case said the court could not make a ruling because it still had to consider extra documents submitted by Polanski’s lawyers. Polanski, who was 43 when he had sex with the 13-year-old, has spent nearly half his life fighting a return visit to Los Angeles county’s district attorney’s office. While on the run from US justice, he has made award-winning films, including The Pianist, which won an Oscar, and has lived mainly in France, which does not extradite its citizens to the US. His most recent film, Venus in Fur, was released in 2013.
In 2009, Polanski was arrested in Zurich on a US warrant and placed under house arrest. He was freed in 2010 after Swiss authorities decided not to extradite him. The director, whose breakthrough film was Rosemary’s Baby, returned to Poland last year for the opening of a Jewish museum in Warsaw and to support other projects aimed at raising the profile of Jewish culture in Poland. He has also been filming a new drama about the Dreyfus affair, based on a novel by Robert Harris.
Since fleeing the US in 1978, Polanski has won an Oscar for The Pianist. His most recent film, Venus in Fur, was released in 2013. Born in France of Polish-Jewish parents in 1933, Polanski was taken to Poland in 1936 and is a survivor of the Krakow ghetto. His mother died at Auschwitz.
If an appeal is successful and the court makes a legally binding decision to grant the US request, it will be up to the Polish justice minister to decide whether to hand Polanski over. Olszewski told the court the US application had many legal flaws, adding: “This is not about justice or the interest of the victim.”
The leader of Poland’s newly elected Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczyński, recently suggested there would be no leniency for the director if the court ruled to extradite him. “There was open talk that he should not be made responsible for his deeds because he is an outstanding, world-famous film-maker. We will totally reject this attitude,” he said. Indeed, since the incident in a bedroom at Jack Nicholson’s house on 10 March 1977 – while the actor was away skiing – the details of the case have become relegated to backstory. As time has passed, the narrative has become dominated by legal procedure: translations, appendices and missing documents. The Swiss and now Polish courts have set out to show up Californian justice as implacable, disingenuous and a little inept.
The victim, who received an out-of-court settlement after suing Polanski in 1988, appears to agree. Now aged 52, Samantha Geimer, as she is known, suggested in a series of recent Facebook postings that US officials had been “using a teenage rape victim’’ and pursuing the case “to cover up their own misconduct”.
Two years ago, in her written account of what happened, The Girl: A Life Lived in the Shadow of Roman Polanski, Geimer said she had forgiven Polanski “not for him, but for me and my husband’’. Geimer, who has three children, wrote: “My family never asked that Polanski be punished. We just wanted the legal machine to stop.”
Mai Fernandez, the executive director of the US National Center for Victims of Crime, said that in principle she thought Polanski should be extradited, but that the wishes of the victim should be taken into account in each case.
“In general the extradition is warranted if the court finds he should be brought to the United States to face justice,” Fernandez said. “Sexual assault on a minor is an extremely serious crime and no matter who you are, you do not get a pass when you have abused a child. The US is doing the right thing in trying to hold him accountable.”
However, she said, the prosecutors and courts must listen to any wishes of the victim.
“A prosecutor’s job is always to bring a perpetrator to justice but you need to take the wants of the victim into account. If she is saying she has had enough, maybe the prosecution of this case is not the best way to bring justice. The views of the victim are often lost in the process, but should be paramount,” she said.
But Fernandez blamed Polanski himself for prolonging the case for so many years because he made himself a fugitive, obliging the US to pursue him.
“It’s Polanski’s fault that this continues because he refused to face justice fully when the charges were originally brought. I’m sure she [Geimer] would have wanted this over and done with long ago. No one wants to have to talk about this over and over and be revictimised; it’s horrible.”