Legal News

Polanski?s Lawyer: Calif. Courts Should Dismiss His Case

By Ashby Jones

A lot of the coverage of the Roman Polanski case has so far focused, understandably, on whether and when the filmmaker will be extradited back to the U.S. to face the music on skipping out on his 1977 conviction.

But what about the conviction itself? Somewhat out of the international spotlight, lawyers for Polanski have been fighting to have it overturned. Such a contingency would, of course, obviate the need to bring the guy back to the U.S.

The latest, courtesy of the LAT: the lawyer for Polanski, Manatt’s Chad Hummel, on Thursday urged a California appeals court panel to toss the case, citing what he called an “astonishing record of misconduct” by the district attorney’s office and the judge who originally handled the case.

Specifically, the justices are weighing whether a trial judge can consider Polanski’s request to dismiss the case and evaluate evidence of misconduct without the filmmaker’s first returning to California.

Hummel argued that Judge Laurence J. Rittenband essentially had it out for Polanski, that he improperly discussed with a prosecutor how to punish Polanski and threatened to lock up the director for a longer period if his attorney challenged the judge’s decision to return Polanski to prison.

“It sends chills up your spine what this judge was doing,” Hummel told the three appellate court justices in downtown Los Angeles.

The director’s lawyers took his case to the appeals court after a Los Angeles judge declined to address similar arguments earlier this year, ruling that Polanski would first need to return to the U.S. On Thursday, however, according to the LAT, the justices suggested that Polanski might be 32 years too late in his request to dismiss the case and asked why he couldn’t have asked his lawyer to raise the misconduct concerns at the time rather than flee the country.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 11, 2009 (boomark / email).