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20/1/2009: Polanski Postpones Fight to Clear His Name
Chad Hummel, the lawyer representing exiled film director Roman Polanski made the request for a postponement of the 21st January hearing into whether the 32-year-old sex charges should be dropped on the grounds that the entire Los Angeles Superior Court had demonstrated bias against the 75-year-old director. The 2nd District Court of Appeal agreed to halt the hearing.
The request was the culmination of two weeks of argument between Polanski’s legal team and the State’s prosecution team. On Monday 5th January 2009, Hummel filed two documents with the court giving reasons why the court should be disqualified from ruling on Polanski’s attempt to have the sexual misconduct charges dropped in light of revelations in an HBO documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Hummel argued that the court expressed a ‘pre-determination’ on the matter when it stated that the director would have to attend the hearing. Polanski was in exile from the States since fleeing the country after pleading guilty to sexual misconduct in 1977, and faced arrest should he set foot back in America. Hummel argued that the statement made by a court spokesman in the 3rd December issue of the L.A. Times that the court had ‘consistently for several years’ insisted on Polanski’s presence at any hearing was not true, and that none of Polanski’s legal team, past or present, had been aware of this position.
A day later, on the 6th January, The District Attorney’s office countered Hummel’s argument by insisting that Polanski was a fugitive from justice and, as such, wasn’t entitled to have his motion for dismissal considered until he surrendered to the court. Requesting that the hearing be removed from the court’s calendar until Polanski had given himself up, Deputy D. A. David Walgren also pointed out that the alleged misconduct upon which Polanski’s case hinged had occurred after the director had pleaded guilty to a felony. Hummel dismissed this position as a tactic by the D.A.’s office ‘to avoid scrutiny of all the misdeeds by focusing on the single issue of whether or not Mr. Polanski needs to be present for a court hearing’, and repeated his request for the hearing to be held away from L.A. County.
On the 9th January, Judge Peter Espinoza denied Polanski’s request for officials – including himself – to be dismissed from the hearing on the grounds that they held a predisposition against the director, stating that there were no legal grounds for disqualification. Pointing out that there were 600 judges in the county he argued that it was unreasonable to charge that it was not possible to find one judge qualified to handle the case. He also said that the stipulation that Polanski be present ‘reflects the order of the judge who issued the bench warrant.’
Two days later, Samantha Geimer, the rape victim in the case, accused the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office of victimising her anew. The 45-year-old mother of three, who had often requested that the charges against Polanski were dropped, wrote in a court filing requesting once more for the case to be dismissed that, ‘I am surprised and disappointed with the District Attorney,’ because of his refusal to drop the case and the fact that he, ‘has, yet one more time, given great publicity to the lurid details of those events, for all to read again.’
Geimer also echoed Polanski’s defence team when she accused the District Attorney’s office of retelling the details to distract attention from accusations of wrongdoing made against them and the judge then assigned to the case. ‘I have dealt with the difficulties of being a victim,’ she wrote, ‘And have surmounted and surpassed them with one exception. Every time this case is brought to the attention of the court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others.’
Referring to the HBO documentary that revived the legal battle to clear Polanski’s name, Geimer argued that it showed that Polanski’s absconding ‘was not voluntary, it was because the judicial system did not work.’ She also argued that insisting he return to the court ‘is a joke, a cruel joke being played on me.’
In her declaration, Geimer also wrote that, ‘If Polanski cannot stand before the court to make this request, I, as the victim, can and I, as the victim do… My views as a victim, my feelings as a victim, or my desires as a victim were never considered or even inquired into by the district attorney prior to the filing. It is clear to me that because the district attorney's office has been accused of wrongdoing, it has recited the lurid details of the case to distract attention from the wrongful conduct of the district attorney's office as well as the judge who was then assigned to the case.’
The legal to-ing and fro-ing continued on the 13th January when Chad Hummel filed a declaration insisting that the fugitive disentitlement doctrine of law that required Polanski to appear in person to have the charges dismissed was inapplicable to the case because the director allegedly signed a waiver of his appearance at all hearings in the case before fleeing the country. The D.A.’s spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons responded by asserting that the exclusion was no longer valid. ‘The waiver does not count anymore,’ she said. ‘There is a warrant out for his arrest.’
Hummel also stated in the same declaration that Polanski had no intention of returning to the States even if he succeeded in having the case against him overturned. Hummel wrote, ‘Mr. Polanski has no plans ever to return to the United States. But the course of what happens here will have an enduring legacy for the justice system.’
On the 20th January, just one day before the hearing was due to begin, the Los Angeles 2nd District Court of Appeal issued a postponement at the request of Polanski’s attorney, who argued that the entire Los Angeles Superior Court had demonstrated a bias against his client. [ADD]
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