Was his arrest in Switzerland right?

In town to accept an award from the Zurich Film Festival, Swiss police arrested filmmaker Roman Polanski at the Zurich airport last night with the intent of sending him back to the US to face a thirty year old arrest warrant for a sex crime in Los Angeles. Polanski was arrested and held in a California prison for 42 days back in 1978 on the charge. Rather than face American justice, he escaped to France and has spent the last three decades working at his craft in countries that don’t recognize American justice.

His run in 1978 wasn’t the first time he has defied authority to escape. As a seven year old child, his father told him to make a run for it just as Nazi’s were sealing off the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Poland before WWII. His mother died in an Auschwitz gas chamber. The “authorities” aren’t always right.

He had another narrow escape when the Manson Family murdered his girlfriend Sharon Tate and several of his friends in a home that he was sharing with her. Sharon was pregnant with his child at the time. He was away on business, or he might have shared her fate.

I admire his work that I have seen. His most famous film is Rosemary’s Baby, but my favorite is The Fearless Vampire Hunters. He and Sharon Tate were both stars in that film. He was a pretty good actor as well as a director. He won an Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist. Understandably, he didn’t show up at the ceremony to accept the award; Harrison Ford stood in for him.

Being famous and talented doesn’t give you a free pass to ignore the law, even though that does happen with American justice more than it should. His crime was statuatory rape of a 13 year old girl some years after Sharon Tate was murdered. Drugs and alchohol were involved too.

So, the question is, “Should a 78 year old man be arrested after thirty years of living a productive and law-abiding life?”

The comments to news stories are extreme on one side or the other. An example of one extreme, “This Director is a rapist!” An example of the other, “This is an absurd waste of time, taxpayer money and most importantly, people’s lives.” The admired former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.”

In my own life these days, I find that I’m sometimes faced with the same dilemma. I’m a member of the local Planning Commission and part of our job is to interpret the rules for building homes and businesses. Sometimes, the rules just don’t make sense. The other part of our job is to rewrite the rules so they will make better sense. It’s a tough job. You should try it.

When I’m faced with a situation where common sense dictates one thing and the rules say another, however, I apologize – but then I go with the rules. The reason is that I just don’t trust “authority” to do the right thing – even when I am the authority. In my previous life in corporate America, I saw executives abuse their authority to benefit their own egos and personal wealth over and over. (See my book review on one of my other web sites, Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!.) I see that happen in government constantly too. The only thing that protects each of us from monsters like the Kings of England and Aztec priests ripping the living hearts out of innocent victims is our shared respect for the rule of law. It’s an agreement among all of us that we will each act in a way that is written down in advance, not in a way that we happen to like at the time.

But the other thing I do in my own life is to work to make the law as fair and impartial as it can be. One of the reasons that a 78 year old artist is being threatened with prison for a thirty year old crime is that Americans seem to be obsessed with sex. It’s worth remembering that our local sex criminal, Warren Jeffs, was convicted of essentially the same crime. (A different set of circumstances, but the same crime.)

We can’t seem to write laws that will throw people in jail for creating personal dictatorships that span the country and steal millions to support a hypocritical lifestyle. But we can convict them of forbidden sex.