ANALYSIS
It was the paperwork, stupid!
That, in essence, is what freed Roman Polanski. Paperwork, and arrogance.
The Swiss government on Monday refused to extradite Polanski back to face justice over the rape of a teen girl because the Los Angles District Attorney’s office and the Department of Justice didn’t want to hand over key documents that they had requested.
So once again, Los Angeles prosecutors have a disastrous loss on their hands, an embarrassing end to a three-decade-long saga of preening and posturing on both sides of the Atlantic.
The U.S. authorities finally had Polanski firmly in their hands … and they let him slip away.
Over some paperwork.
What the district attorney and the DOJ never seemed to understand was that for the Swiss, the Polanski case was never about the sodomization of a 13-year-old, or even his flight from justice. It was about that most American of tradition: due process.
Specifically, they wanted to see the closed testimony that Roger Gunson, the former deputy district attorney who handled the Polanski case back in the 1970s, gave under seal back on Feb. 26 (which, as a curious aside, the meticulous Swiss incorrectly cite as Jan 26th in their Monday statement).
If it wasn’t for the Americans' stringent refusal to hand over that secret testimony, Roman Polanski would likely be sitting today in a U.S. courtroom, a U.S. jail or – even more likely – a U.S. studio executive’s office.
That testimony was to be used in the unfortunate (but not unlikely) event that the ailing Gunson would be unable to appear in court. Polanski's lawyers repeatedly tried to get it opened and handed over to the Swiss. Their failure to do so is the reason Polanski is celebrating his freedom to move about France, Poland and possibly Switzerland.
(He can also confidently travel to Namibia, North Korea and China, none of whom have an extradition treaty.)
Polanski’s lawyers, who declined to comment to TheWrap on Monday, claimed that testimony revealed judicial misconduct back in the 1970s and that then Judge Laurence J. Rittenband’s sentence of 42 days in a prison psychiatric unit was supposed to be his full sentence.
If that was the case, under the extradition treaty with the Swiss, the U.S. might have had no case. Or they might have – but the Swiss, who thought it odd the U.S. started going after Polanski again in 2005 after decades of non-action, wanted all the facts.
Without them, Swiss Justice officials didn’t feel that Polanski, who has admitted he drugged and raped a child, fairly received due process from either the district attorney or the DOJ. In fact, the Swiss didn’t feel they themselves received fair treatment on May 13, when the Department of Justice refused, based on Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza’s May 10 decision to keep it sealed, their request’s to see Gunson’s Feb.
