Cornfed Hick
Ancient Mariner
correctLooseCannon said:
I read the article, and as you can see from my posts, I'm quite calm. Note, it was I who suggested that there may be mitigating circumstances, and that there was questionable (perhaps even improper) conduct by the superior court judge and the prosecutor in this case. My point was that, when talking about crime and punishment, your dismissal of bright-line rules of law as "generalizations" didn't make sense to me, so I asked you to explain it. The article does raise an interesting issue about the impact on the victim, but I have two thoughts: First, on some level, it doesn't matter what the victim thinks. Even if the victims don't want the criminals who injured them prosecuted, it should still be done. Otherwise, people who can threaten and/or pay off victims can avoid justice. Not saying that necessarily happened here -- though the articles in this thread indicate that there was, in fact, a civil settlement -- but you cannot base criminal prosecution decisions solely on what the victim wants. For example, one could argue that every rape trial is traumatic for the victim. But rapists should still be tried, else society is less safe. Second, Ms. Gailey isn't exactly shying away from the media. For example, she attended the premiere of the film about this case (which is fascinating, by the way, particularly as it describes the actions of the judge and prosecutor, though critics have called it a "whitewash" and a "rape apologia"). Don't misconstrue this as attacking the victim, I'm just saying she isn't shy about talking to the media, so talking about it for a couple of hours in a courtroom shouldn't be too traumatic.Forostar said:
I certainly believe in compassion for the victim, and on some level I feel compassion for Polanski insofar as he went through an awful experience when Sharon Tate was murdered (the film reminded me that, for a short time, Polanski was even suspected of the crime, which had to compound the agony). But I have little compassion for him as a result of his fugitive status and the "loss" of his "glittering" career -- in which he still made films, and won awards, long after his escape from justice. I agree he's not on the same level as a war criminal, but that doesn't mean that his allegedly criminal conduct should be forgotten and forgiven by society.
For what it is worth, the following passage (from a guy named Michael Wolff, quoted in NYTimes.com) is the best argument I've read AGAINST Polanski's arrest, and it has nothing to do with compassion. Rather, it pertains to a subject near and dear to my heart, namely, cynicism about government motives:
Prosecutors ignored Polanski for 30 years because it was a terrible case in which the prosecutor’s office and the sitting judge, in the interest of getting publicity for themselves, had conducted themselves in all variety of dubious ways. But then, last year, a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, came out detailing all this dubiousness. So the first motivation for going after Polanski now, as it so often is with prosecutors, is revenge—Polanski and this film makes the DA look bad. The second is that the documentary reminded everybody that the LA prosecutor must be turning a blind eye to Polanski, wandering freely in Europe—hence the arrest now is the prosecutor covering his ass. The third is—and it’s curiously the success of the documentary that made the LA prosecutor’s office realize the brand name significance of the case—press. The headlines now sweeping the world are the prosecutor’s ultimate benefit. Many careers are suddenly advanced. It could tell us quite a lot about the real motivations and real interest in Roman Polanski in the LA prosecutor’s office, about the sudden enthusiasm for Polanski’s capture and the convenient timing of it, if we just got the date and time—Polanski’s lawyers can certainly get this information through discovery requests—when they began to Google him, and when they set up the first alert.
