Word: arresters
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...deceased Laurence J. Rittenband, meant to backtrack on a plea agreement and send him back to prison. Polanski's most recent attempts to have the case dismissed faltered because of a chicken-and-egg legal loop. Polanski refused to appear in court in person for fear of arrest. Even if judges were sympathetic, most subscribe to the Fugitive Disentitlement Doctrine, which says a court will not adjudicate a claim made by a fugitive because if the fugitive loses, the court has no way to enforce its order...
Late in 2008, Polanski sought to have the charges dropped after an HBO documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, detailed claims of judicial and prosecutorial wrongdoing during the time of the director's original arrest. In the film, the then Los Angeles deputy district attorney, David Wells, says he met with Rittenband without the presence of defense counsel to argue for more jail time for Polanski. Wells was not himself an attorney on the case but he was a lawyer working for one of the parties, the state of California. The California Code of Judicial Ethics forbids judges to engage...
...Polanski should not have to do any more jail time and that the court had been wrong to renege on the prior deal." In July, Polanski's lawyers appealed Espinoza's ruling, once again alleging misconduct and claiming California was consciously avoiding extradition efforts. And then came the Swiss arrest on the decades-old outstanding warrants...
Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, denied that Polanski's arrest had anything to do with his recent court filings, but rather was part of an ongoing effort to apprehend him. "We've been doing this involving this particular fugitive since one day after the bench warrant was issued in 1978," Gibbons told TIME, "and we've been continuing to do it throughout that time period. There have been other efforts to arrest him, [but] they were unsuccessful. This particular effort was successful. I can't say anything more than that." Los Angeles prosecutors...
Unsurprisingly, Polanski, a French citizen, is contesting extradition in what is sure to be a lengthy appeals process. One tactic Polanski's legal team may take is to challenge the lawfulness of the arrest warrant on the basis of misconduct during the original legal proceedings. "His lawyers could argue that this is an invalid conviction because it's based on a fraud. Then you could have a Swiss court decide whether or not the proceedings here in Los Angeles were so corrupt that they invalidate the conviction," says Harland Braun, a criminal defense attorney and former deputy district attorney...