A judge has rejected director Roman Polanski’s bid to be sentenced in absentia in a three-decade-old child-sex case.
Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that Polanski, 76, will have to come back Los Angeles to be sentenced.
"I have made it clear he needs to surrender," the judge said.
Polanski’s attorneys said they would appeal.
The famed film director is under house arrest in Switzerland, where he is waiting to learn whether the Swiss government will extradite him to the U.S. to face sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl.
Polanski received some support this week from his victim.
In papers filed in Superior Court on Thursday, Samantha Geimer’s lawyer accused
the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office of violating state
victims’ rights statutes by not consulting Geimer before seeking
extradition.
In the filing, attorney Lawrence Silver wrote
that Marsy’s Law — a 2008 statute passed by ballot initiative — gives
crime victims the right "to reasonably confer with the prosecuting
agency, upon request, regarding … the determination whether to
extradite the defendant."
The attorney said he wrote to
prosecutors in July and made clear that Geimer wanted to meet with them
and that she planned to "exercise every right that she may have under
the Victims’ Bill of Rights." Two months later, Polanski was arrested
in Zurich on a three-decade-old arrest warrant, and prosecutors
subsequently submitted a formal extradition request. A Swiss court has
yet to decide the matter.
Hours after the documents were filed, the district attorney’s office fired back with its own filing.
Deputy
Dist. Atty. David Walgren wrote that over the last year, Geimer and her
attorney ignored repeated offers to discuss the case. The filing
included copies of 11 e-mails that Walgren sent to Silver — five of
which contained offers to talk about the case.
"Despite multiple
invitations to meet and confer, Mr. Silver has never once responded to
these entreaties," Walgren wrote. He suggested the victims’ rights
statute was being twisted to benefit Polanski.
Marsy’s Law
"was intended to protect the rights of victims. It was not intended to
be vicariously used by a defendant to avoid prosecution," Walgren
wrote.
Geimer was 13 at the time of the crime and is now a
wife and mother living in Hawaii. She has never changed her account of
being raped and sodomized by Polanski during a photo shoot at Jack
Nicholson’s house in 1977, but her stance toward Polanski changed in
the years after she and the director settled a civil suit brought
against him for sexual assault and other claims.
Under the terms of the
1993 confidential agreement, he agreed to pay her at least $500,000.
— Harriet Ryan