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...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 filing that the California authorities were not making any attempt...
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...
...film's allegations, however, became central to Polanski's late 2008 appeal. In February 2009, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza, citing Polanski's fugitive status and refusal to appear in court in person, ruled against his request, but also indicated that he was open to arguments that misconduct had occurred. Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who was at the hearing, says Espinoza "was open to the argument that Polanski should not have to do any more jail time and that the court had been wrong to renege on the prior deal...
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...
...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 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...