(no subject)

[tahnan]

Over at Dreamwidth, Jadelennox posted an opinion on the Polanski case, the gist of which is that she can't believe other Hollywood folks are saying "let him go, it's not that big a deal". Mostly I agreed, but part of me felt (and posted), "Can't we just ignore it and let the law sort it out, as the law is supposed to?".

Except that then I read the actual petition signed by Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and so forth, which refers to his crime as "a case of morals", as if we should recognize that different people might have different opinions about drugging and raping a minor. And i thought, "Sheesh".

Thus I offer a quote from actress Alison Arngrim, as reported by the NYTimes: "If Roman Polanski were a Catholic priest or a Republican senator, would these people feel the same way?"

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Yeah. He's astoundingly lucky to have escaped the US legal system for so long, and kudos to him for making the most of his time in the meantime - but none of that changes the facts of the case.

I really don't understand how you can get around the fact that he committed an awful crime, pleaded guilty, and fled the country to avoid sentencing. I guess you can ask for a presidential pardon, but short of that, our system isn't based on doing good work to wipe out previous bad. It's based on punishments for proven crimes. I'm fine with the idea that it's 30 years later and he doesn't seem to be a repeat offender (if that's true, no clue actually) factoring into the length of sentence (and would be for any resurfaced criminal) - but guilty is guilty.

It reminds me a lot of things like Weather Underground (or other radical organizations) members that changed their name and lived for decades before being caught, having lived a normal, law-abiding life in the meantime. It's certainly very good that they reformed, and that's relevant for a parole hearing, but the crimes of the past are the crimes of the past.

If someone wants to argue for a statute of limitation on child rape... I say, really? Really really? That's your cause? Good luck.

[lemurtanis.livejournal.com]

Heh. Last night I was reading about this and I turned to Chad and yelled, "a case of MORALS?!?!?!?"

(Side note: I was deciding how to punctuate the above and was amused by the diversity of your approaches to the problem in this post.)

[selinker.livejournal.com]

There absolutely should be a statute of limitations on unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. They're very long in these cases, but they should exist.

However, there's no statute of limitations on this crime, because he pled guilty. There's also no statute on limitations on his flight from prosecution, since what that did was delay the imposition of the first sentence. Polanski needs to be in jail.

As a card-carrying member of the liberal media elite, I wish that just this one time, we would keep our big yap shut.