MediavalDom,
I'm not doing this or made any comment with the intent at all to start a flame war. I'm voicing my opinion because this issue firstly interested me from a legal point of view then when I found out the dirth of actual evidence, annoyed me. And the comment about reading the transcript was simply made because the transcript is not scintilating reading and is 36 pages. But if you read it all fine. You would have noticed the great deal of leading questions, not allowed in a court, and the total lack of follow up questions when something that even a judge would not have let stand without follow up question was just allowed to be said. For instance what does having sex "one or two times" mean? While the question should never have seen the light of day the fact is it did and the question that should have followed was whether the girl had sex on the day of the alleged event. That one is staggeringly important. There are a great deal of other matters that were glossed over by the prosecutor that, even before a grand jury should never have been allowed to stand without clarification but it really doesn't matter to the point of whether Polanski deserves to be impaled on a red hot poker or not.
To address the points raised, I've been to EVERY continent on this earth. That includes Afghtanistan where I fought for the freedom of women and against their stoning or rape, and alongside Freedom Fighters that were ten and eleven. Not everywhere on earth decides that children are protected until they are 18. I have watched the Isrealis flattened innocent families in camps defending their borders against rockets from Jordan, was in Iraq, lived in Kuwait, Saudi, Singapore, Samoa and many other places. Completely off the point but Samoa is playing on me because I knew a number of people that died. I can afford to write on this site because my spine is stuffed due to combat. I didn't fight because I like to kill things. I did it so others could be free and that includes those accused of a crime that deserve the protection of the law just as much as the victim. Without it you have mob rule, or live like the Saudis, a place that I found to be close to Hell on earth.
I have been in Thailand where nine year olds are sold as sex toys. I'm well aware of the injustices of this world.
So if you want to argue about personal experiences, which is totally irrelevant to this discussion by the way, pick someone else because it is not going to mean much to me at all.
But you are right. I do put myself in Polanski's shoes to see what he faced, or more correctly his legal adviser's shoes to see just what case was arrayed against him and whether, as a basis of law the case had validity or was an appalling micarriage of justice to all concerned. The protection of those accused of crimes was so important to the founding fathers of the US that it was enshrined in the main body of the Constitution and is the thing the US Constitution guards so fervently and which so many Americans have died to defend. They did it to defend the rights of defendants from bad prosecutions, not just to guard the innocent. I hold a terminal degree in Law. If you know what that is and you stike me as intelligent so I presume you do, you will know what that is, you will realise that I'm not just blowing smoke at all. And I am a US Citizen although that is a quirk of my background not because I generally live there. Since I also hold French citizenship, I can actually put myself farely well in Polanski's shoes. Faced with the choice he had I would have did what he did and that is assuming I was completely innocent of any crime. Had I been his legal adviser I could not have advised him to skip the country but would have had an obligation to tell him of the likelihood of his staying in prison for many years despite the deal with the prosecuter and based on what the judge said. It pretty much amounts to the same thing, semantics aside. I'd be telling him, stay in the US and you are going to jail for a long time but couched in careful legal wording that would not open me or anyone one else on his legal team up for a claim of professional misconduct or a breach of any law. You mightn't like that this is possible and probably even happened but that is the state of the law and the duty of a lawyer. To not advise him of his chances of serving time in jail would definitly have been professional misconduct.
As a principal of law, the case against Polanski should never been brought before a grand jury. The evidence is not enough for a prima facie case in my professional opinion and is contrary to the law where he was charged. That is something that stikes me as pathetic. That a prosecutor or the DA decided to ignore their own very sensible laws in relation to the admission of evidence is not exactly making them look good in this matter, not to anyone that is interested in the law and not gossip.
Plea bargains are an enathema to justice, as is large discounts of sentencing for an early guilty plea. In some jurisdictions both processes are now severely limited. Just this week a man was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to burglary. The trouble is he didn't do the crime. There was a mix up in the DNA lab and his DNA was switched with a sample from a 2002 burglary. But faced with DNA evidence he pled guilty knowing he was anything but. Would you like me to start to quote the capital cases all across the US and the rape cases where the convicted man has served long sentences only to be proved innocent by DNA?
I do not care if Polanski is a creep or even if he is guilty. I'm sorry but sometimes the guilty cannot be prosecuted because their just isn't the evedence. That beats the alternative of locking up people because you just "know" they are guilty. Police hate rape cases. You learn very quickly that justice is almost never served, no matter what laws there are to protect the victim, simply providing the most rudimentary protection to the defendant means it is going to be intensely traumatic. And evidence is often just not there to know who is telling even the partial truth. And Police start to disbelieve women who complain of rape simply because the first case they do where they do believe the woman or if not the first, the second or the third, and the evidence is found after they have put a man through hell and his wife has left and taken the kids with her and applied to the court to deny all visitation rights, that the woman was lying because she was a nut, he lied to the woman about leaving his wife, she had a crush on him that was not returned, he took her parking space (that one happened to me, as a case not personally) or he was a mark and civil actions for rape get you an awful lot of money in the US. The particular woman in Polanski's matter benefited greatly by just such an action and the payment of that money also means nothing. The US has this ridiculous principal that the loser of a civil suit can walk away without any penalty at all. Most other countries have the loser pay the court costs of the winner. That has is a rather large incentive not to take speculative action in a civil suit unless the evidence is pretty good. In Polanski's case the cost of settling would probably have been less than his legal costs which can go into the millions quite quickly.
And you are very wrong about rape cases except in some states that don't care about victims or simply can't work out a good balance between the rights of an accused and an accuser. I was very careful about what I said about the case saying such things as, at least based on the law at the time. The law has changed. Many jurisdictions do not allow the introduction of evidence about the victim's past, their dress, or anything else inflammatory and prejudiced against the victim except in the most exceptional circumstances. A prostitute specialising in play acting of non consential sex would be just such an exception.
Polanski is NOT a peodophile. That word has a very specific meaning. It means basically "An adult who is sexually attracted to a child or children" and as a matter of law the word child in that definition refers to below puberty, not a child being anyone under 18, which is a common definition throughout the western world for many laws. He might be a pervert how likes young post-pubescent women or girls but that is a different thing entirely. The word is also very strictly defined under various mental health laws or even in the Psychiatric bible of mental health diseases. I prefer that if you are going to argue anything, don't do it with a deliberatly inflammatory word. It is good enough to just say he is a creep and a pervert if you want.
I said that no matter what was written or what evidence was produced your opinion probably would not change. However I didn't write these just as a response to your posts. Others might actually be interested in a differing view and I hope it made some people at least pause to think whether in the end it changed their minds or not.
Bad justice is not acceptable because it is against an upopular person because for every Polanski that gets a huge amount of publicity there are thousands of cases that have been run because of the mind set of a prosecutor that he could get away with a blatant disregard to his first and only obligation and that is that justice is served. Prosecuters very often play to win, not to see justice served. The defence can afford to play to win and really should. A system that rewards a prosecutor for doing the same sets a great many up to be railroaded regardless of the evidence or their innocence. I repeat again, as a basis of law, this case should never have been brought to a grand jury and that urks me greatly. Injustice is injustice and the time that it becomes the most important is when the victim of the injustice is not likeable.
I was making another point but I don't think you even accepted that it was a possibility. Teens do make bad choices but that is their right to do. There is good evolutionary reasons for this but that doesn't mean that a teenage is incapable of making any decision about themselves or is going to do so regardless of what laws there are. Young teens are going to have sex, no matter what the law says. Not all of them, sure. But a lot of them are. I was making the point that this issue is not black and white at all and where do you draw the line? When the male is two years older, three? Five? When the girl is "asking for it", something that personally is abhoren to me as an excuse by the way. What about an active seduction? Or a girl that just doesn't want bad fumbling sex and chooses a mature partner? So the man should be responsible and say no but to whom, a 16 year old? An 18 year old? Anyone that is more than ten years younger than them?
I refused a 25 year old's advances because I thought she had the maturity of a 12 year old amongst other things. She kept it up and even attempted blackmail to get her own way. I'm wondering if you think me a pervert because she was many years younger than me anyway. Personally I would have thought of myself a pervert for accepting such an advance because I judged her emotional maturity to be 12 and she looks about 14 and in her case her looks match her emotional maturity. Oh, and she is not suffering from any brain damage, low IQ or whatever and even if she did, isn't she entitled at 25 to have sex if she wants (just not by means of coercion or subtefuge).
It steams me greatly that people stop Downs syndrome adults from having sex because they have the mental age of a child or very young teen and I'm not talking of protecting them against someone seeking to take advantage of them, rather I know of cases where parents have succeeded in stopping sex between two adult consenting Downs Syndrome people. I really was trying to make the point that biological age is only one small part of the question. Oh, and the blackmail was a pretty good reason to give in to avoid the threat, not because I had done anything wrong but because she could make it sound very plausable that I did. I'm using this example because it does not confuse the issue about being underage because she definitely is not underage by anyone's definition. But the issues remain similar. The question of maturity, the easy use of blackmail or threats when someone who is immature doesn't get what they want, the right to decide for themselves to perform a basic fundamental human function. I could go on about this aspect but I don't think it matters.
You and many others are not going to see that it is not always black and white at all. I wasn't actually condoning Polanski's actions if the girl had actually consented and then lied to cover up doing so. My personal view is that in the circumstances outlined but with complete consent it still involved actively seeking out sex with a girl and I find that distasteful but not in the same scale or ballpark as a rapist. Would it matter perhaps if she was the one that actively pursued the sex? I still would think less of a man that agreed but I also wouldn't think he deserved to have a red hot poker shoved up his arse or to be locked up for years. It still involves a physically mature girl who voluntarily was having sex anyway. I'd actually like to know what you think would be the interests of the wider community in prosecuting someone in that case. Exactly who would be harmed in the last scenario? The girl? If she is having sex and actively seeks out a partner for sex, exactly how would she be harmed because the partner's age was 18 rather than 14 or 21 or 25 or 43? I'm just interested in why there would necessarily be any harm and why the age of the person either produces that harm or makes it worse.
This is my last post on this subject. I've exhausted the issues that I thought worth discussing. I'm not looking for answers of any of the questions I posed either. But I'd like to think that either you or someone else that decided to read this thread just thinks about the questions, no matter what they decide. Being confronted with opinions contrary to your comfortable view of the world is a good thing. I'm grateful to you MediavalDom for your views because they got me to think about these issues and I did try to see your point of view. In the end I chose to continue to disagree but still thinking about these matters and even finding the incentive to look more closely at the evidence of this case was a good thing in my view. This case will actually make a good topic for discussion with law students, especially given the evidence that was released, whether that was just so Miramax had a better chance of having a film win an Oscar and despite my personal great distaste that the private and personal life of a young girl and now a woman was exposed. I'm sure would rather not have had the whole world knowing she was sexually active, took drugs and got drunk at 13.
If I did nothing else for anyone than allowed them to think about the issues surrounding this case because it interested them enough to open up this thread, I'm happy. I certainly don't assume the force of my argument will mean many or anyone will agree with me. This is a part of the forum that specifically invites conflicting views and warns not to enter or post if you don't want such conflict. This particular topic interested me from a legal perspective and no one else was offering an opposing view. What's the point of everyone agreeing in such a topic? And in this case I really do view the law as being very badly served and for it to stand without condemnation just invites further and worse injustices. I can make that point in other places where it might have a real impact but this forced me to think and respond to posts and that wasn't a bad thing.
So I'll end with a few sayings of Voltaire included the best known and the one most would think most relevant to this discussion:
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Others that I think relevant to this:
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities
[such as sticking a hot poker up someone's arse, sorry for the addition, couldn't resist]"
"Common sense is not so common"
Oh and one that goes to disagreeing with a legal decision that is strenously defended by the authorities:
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."