Word: districters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Roman Polanski's recent attempts to have a decades-old statutory rape charge dropped somehow accelerate the extradition efforts that led to his arrest in Switzerland? Earlier this year, lawyers for the fugitive Oscar-winning director filed two separate documents with the California Second District Court of Appeal asking for the dismissal of all charges and alleging that the Los Angeles district attorney's office in effect benefited from Polanski's absence, because as long as he remained a fugitive, it could dodge answering allegations of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct during the case. Indeed, the lawyers alleged in the July...
...district attorney's office denies there is any linkage between potential allegations of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct and Polanski's Sept. 26 arrest in Switzerland. It also provided a statement detailing previous extradition efforts, including an attempt to arrest Polanski, now 76, while he was in Israel in 2007. But the recent legal motions on Polanski's part seemed to have rolled into his apprehension in Switzerland, after years of apparent inactivity in a case that is far more complicated than just an unpunished sex crime, which is how it has been debated through the week. (See a list...
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...
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...
...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 in Los Angeles County. Braun, who worked in Rittenband's court as a young attorney, says the judge routinely held ex parte communications with state prosecutors. "He would talk to people without the other side there, which is completely illegal. Now I didn't do it because I knew...