Roman Polanski’s attorneys have opened a new front in the years-long legal effort to have all charges against the Oscar-winning director dismissed, more than three decades after he fled Los Angeles for France to avoid sentencing for sexually assaulting a teenager, it was reported today.
Polanski’s legal team, which now includes celebrity attorney Alan M. Dershowitz, is making accusations of prosecutorial misconduct in its effort to end the case, which has kept the director out of the United States as well as many countries with U.S. extradition treaties since he fled in 1978, the Los Angeles Times reported.
In court papers filed Monday in Los Angeles, Polanski’s attorneys allege that district attorneys and judges carried out “serious misconduct” in an effort to prosecute, and later force the return of, the famed director, according to The Times.
The 133-page motion seeks an evidentiary hearing to determine whether “pervasive” misconduct and a “false” extradition request sent Oct. 28, 2014, by the Department of Justice to the Polish government requires dismissal of the case against Polanski.
Polanski was charged in 1977 with raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl during a photo shoot. In a plea deal, the Polish-born director pleaded guilty to one count of statutory rape, but he was never formally sentenced. He spent a month and a half in state prison for psychological testing, but the night before his sentencing he fled to Europe after learning from his attorney that the judge planned to give him additional time in prison beyond the 42 days he had served.
Monday’s motion centers on an attempt in October to arrest Polanski while he was attending the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. His attorneys say the extradition request omits that he served court-ordered prison time because prosecutors were trying to align the case history to meet the criteria of an extradition treaty between the United States and Poland, according to The Times.
