--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_re...@...> wrote: > > The guy should have received the same jail sentence as > anyone else in the state of California convicted of > having had sex with a minor. End of story. "Weighting" > his sentence and making it lighter because he was famous > is unacceptable. "Weighting" his sentence and making it > longer because of hearsay that was never allowed to be > presented in court (because of the plea bargain) and > that he was never convicted of is unacceptable. > > Stop letting emotion poison your brains, people. Step > away from the outrage (faux or real) and away from the > revenge fantasies and try to remember the *facts*. Roman > Polanski was convicted of having sex with a minor. Period. > > If you're calling for "punishment" for more than that, > the person who considers themselves "above the law" > is YOU.
I'll follow up on this to make one additional factual point and then riff on it. Of course there is now one additional charge that can be applied to Roman Polanski besides having had sex with a minor -- fleeing the country before final sentence was passed. In my opinion that's what all this furor is really about. The people who are still trying to drag him back to the US are *using* the emotional angle of his case to hide what they are *really* pissed off about -- international extradition agreements and the fact that they don't work the way that the US would like them to. This whole furor is an attempt IMO to force the international community to abide by *America's* view of what "law" is. They want to insure that in the future anyone they call a criminal in the United States is considered one all over the world, to the point that these other countries will spend their own time, energy, and money tracking down these US criminals to return them to "justice" in America. Not gonna happen. France has extradition agree- ments with the US, but reserves the right to make its own decisions on whether to extradite or not. So, until the recent American bullying started, did Switzerland. My bet is that the Swiss, who worship money even more than the Americans do, will capitulate and return Polanski to the US, where they'll throw the book at him for revealing the American "justice system's" 1) lack of justice and 2) its impotence. It's having been bested by a short, Polish twerp that's really the issue here. They cannot abide that. The thing they're using to "chum the waters" of international sentiment and get him extradited are the hearsay elements of the case, things he was never convicted of, things that were never presented in court in the first place. But the real reason they're still after him IMO is because he proved to the world 1) just how corrupt the American legal system is, and 2) how easy it is to ignore if you take a mind to. And that's probably about all I have to say about Roman Polanski, except to establish what I have said and continue to say here, as opposed to the things that bitter old harpies and hate junkies *claim* that I've said. I think that Polanski: * Should have spent more time in jail than he did, for the crime of which he was convicted -- having sex with a minor. * Should not have had that time weighted *either* by the fact that he was a celebrity *or* because of charges made against him that were dropped and of which he was *not* convicted. * Is probably a real sleazeball, and not a very good filmmaker. He all too often relies on the very thing that is being used against him to "sell" his movies -- an appeal to cheap emotion (cf. "The Pianist"). * Is toast. The Swiss are ruled by the love of money and are not about to risk having the US investigate their hiding of it any further by fighting extradition.
