Well, according to this survey, probably no jail time at all:

http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2005-06/05-053.html

“Most defendants avoid prison entirely, although statutory rape is punishable by up to 5 years.
Only 20.2 percent of persons who were originally charged only with statutory rape and then
convicted were incarcerated. In cases where statutory rape was one of a number of charges,
only 37 percent were incarcerated on statutory rape charges.”

I think you’re playing a tricky game of using high-faluting
rhetoric and grand-sounding phrases to mask a pretty grubby
plan of vengeance which is nothing better than the talk
about punching Polanski in the nose.

“And utilitarianism, as I noted above, is crap”

It’s not the answer to everything. But utilitarianism forces
you to think long and hard about the probable consequences of
your actions. Other so-called “principles” tend to be abused
as ways of making justifications for whatever the hell you
feel like doing.

Personally, I find the idea of locking up a 76-year-old man
for several years to “rot in jail” to be both useless and somewhat sick.
I’m concentrating on the “useless” because – as with the
vast range of sexual proclivities – people are free to feel
and want whatever they like, no matter how distasteful it
might be to others, as long as they don’t cause harm.

The judge can do anything he wants. He SHOULDN’T take into account that Polanski decided to hook up with a very young French woman and have children, except as further evidence of the man’s pedophilia and dangerousness. But if he wishes to, that is within his power.

You seem to think that unless a society ACHIEVES perfect equal justice, equal justice is irrelevant as even a goal. That is not the case. And utilitarianism, as I noted above, is crap (something, by the way, that just about every intelligent individual discovers after exploring even a few philosophical hypotheticals).

We don’t achieve perfect equal justice, we screw up a lot, and none of that justifies letting a rich pedophile escape justice. If anything, he should rot in jail just to offend you and all the other utilitarians out there. That’s justification enough on my cost-benefit analysis.

The same prinviple that leads us to let white-collar cocaine users
off with a slap on the wrist, while crack cocaine users get long
mandatory minimum sentences ?

You’re telling me that our criminal justice system is based on
core principles like retributive justice and equality. Which
amounts to the argument “we’ve always done it this way”. But as
a progressive, I give that argument no value at all. A valid
argument might be “we’ve always done it this way and it works well”.
But the “works well” claim is hard to support in the USA:
“we’ve always done it this way and it’s a complete mess” would
be closer to the truth.

On top of that, you mostly seem pretty happy about the idea
that the judge would exercise his discretion over sentencing
to take into account various factors extraneous to the actual
conviction as justification for a heavy sentence. If there’s
discretion, it cuts both ways.

It’s stupid because the only way you could take that into account is by throwing out the principle of equal justice and saying that criminal parents get more lenient treatment than criminal non-parents.

And since equal justice is a core societal value, utilitarians who would throw it out based on smart-ass cost-benefit calculations are idiots who are too in love with their philosophical theory.

So it’s “stupid” to suggest that maybe harming innocent children is not the
best response to a crime against an innocent child ?

And elsewhere on the thread my views are described as “pro-pedophile” even though
I’ve explicitly and at length stated my support for age-of-consent laws,
my reasons for such support, and my preference for laws and policies which would
*actually* reduce the frequency of early-teen sex.

Turn off the bile. Engage brains. Please. You’re out for revenge, dressed up
in fancy language as “philosophy of retributive justice”. But you’re going to
be dissatisfied with the outcome – revenge fantasies don’t turn out so neatly
in real life.

Well, I’m done. This is evidently a topic on which few are prepared to engage
in analysis and rational thought.

This ain’t OJ. The most likely scenario is that he’s going to lose his extradition fight and isn’t going to be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea. And that means no trial, just a sentencing hearing. That’s not going to cost anything near OJ levels.

Really ? As a utilitarian, I’d say it damn well ought to be.
Taking parents away from their families has both short-term
and long-term bad consequences.

Thanks for demonstrating quite nicely why utilitarian philosophy can be so stupid.

As I posted, that may well depend on whether you can get the
appropriate waiver from the extraditing country. If you
extradite on a rape charge, you don’t get carte blanche to
apply other charges (whether or not the rape charge sticks).

In California, that argument doesn’t apply to the charge of flight from the jurisdiction. You can always charge it, no matter what the extradited charge is.

1) There was another woman at Jack Nicholson’s house when Polanski and
the victim first arrived. She left for a while and returned during
the encounter. That gives Polanski a strong argument against the
accusation that this was a carefully planned premeditated crime.

2) While the victim said “no” and “stop” repeatedly, there’s no
claim that Polanski used actual violence. So there’s unlikely to
be physical evidence (e.g. bruises or scratches or blood) to prove
the lack of consent.

To be clear, it’s still rape, and it’s awful. But there’s a big gap
between what probably happened, and what can be proved in court to
12 members of a jury beyond reasonable doubt.

“I personally do not believe Polanski’s prospects before a jury were very good at all.”

This seems a little incoherent to me.

Anyhow, I’ll confess I haven’t read the grand jury testimony. But a priori,
my thought is that Polanski, in his mid-forties, a brilliant man, an
accomplished actor, evidently a charming fellow when he wanted to be,
of course with a tragic backstory to elicit sympathy, and plenty
of money to hire excellent lawyers, would probably have been a very effective
witness in his own defense. And against that the prosecution would have had
to put up a 13-year-old girl, in what was inevitably going to be mostly
a he-said, she-said case.

I don’t think I would have liked that matchup, unless I had really
compelling physical evidence to back up the girl’s version.

It’s not fair, but such considerations probably influenced the
prosecutor’s acceptance of a lenient plea deal. Sometimes the actors
are a bigger factor than the script.

What leapt out at me on reading the victim’s grand jury testimony, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/polanskicover1.html, was how well positioned Polanski was to argue “consent” to the jury. From the way the DA laid out his case before the grand jury, it was clear that DA had foreseen not just the outlines of Polanski’s defense, but the particulars as well, and the argument to the jury would be whether one can get that well positioned by accident.

I realize this was California, but I personally do not believe Polanski’s prospects before a jury were very good at all.

As far as the judge is concerned, by the late 70′s, trial judges carefully avoided reading pretrial testimony or reports until after the trial or plea of guilty, lest the defendant waive the jury and demand a new judge, the first judge having prejudiced himself by reading pretrial testimony. In the trade, it’s called “judge-shopping.”

If the judge had not decided by himself to look at the grand jury testimony after the plea but before sentencing, I’m sure the probation officer would have pressed him to do so. Any judge who had seen Polanski’s well-prepared “consent” defense before would have, in my opinion, been angered by the way Polanski manipulated his victim. Furthermore, the well-organized character of Polanski’s defense tends to rebut the theory that this was a “first offense.”

OJ’s defense cost $3-6M. Supposing the prosecution was public employees
working for 1/3 the cost, that would be about $1-2M in prosecution costs,
plus 134 days of trial time with associated court employees.

Maybe it’s not gonna be *that* big, but probably in the millions.

“3. Many criminals are married and with children. That’s not really a serious
argument against prosecuting / incarcerating someone.”

Really ? As a utilitarian, I’d say it damn well ought to be.
Taking parents away from their families has both short-term
and long-term bad consequences.

“(b) he can still be prosecuted for fleeing the jurisdiction.”

As I posted, that may well depend on whether you can get the
appropriate waiver from the extraditing country. If you
extradite on a rape charge, you don’t get carte blanche to
apply other charges (whether or not the rape charge sticks).

1. Are we spending millions of dollars? I doubt it. Few hundred thousand, maybe. Some time of salaried public employees, sure. Not millions.

2. I doubt this is a serious source of diplomatic friction with France. In any event, these scenarios have happened previously (e.g., Ira Einhorn) and we still seem to have a good relationship with them.

3. Many criminals are married and with children. That’s not really a serious argument against prosecuting / incarcerating someone.

And then you never know quite how any legal case is going to
turn out. It may be that all the time and money and aggravation
will end up with the conviction being overturned on appeal,
and no prison term after all.

As I said, I have no problem with Polanski making his prosecutorial / judicial misconduct arguments. They are serious arguments worthy of consideration. But even if he skates on a technicality, (a) he still had to come back here to face his charge, which has value, and (b) he can still be prosecuted for fleeing the jurisdiction.

Oh, I daresay he “deserves” a prison term. But is it worth
spending millions of dollars and causing diplomatic friction with
France and causing harm to his innocent wife and two children
to satisfy some rather abstract notion of retribution ?

And then you never know quite how any legal case is going to
turn out. It may be that all the time and money and aggravation
will end up with the conviction being overturned on appeal,
and no prison term after all. The costs are high, the risks
are high, the possible benefit is low. Not a wise bet.

Plenty of other countries which have lower crime rates also consider retribution a valid grounds for punishment. This isn’t something that Americans just made up out of whole cloth, you know. It’s part of the triad of justifications for criminal punishment (along with deterrence and incapacitation), all over the world.

As for the rest of your arguments, lots of things may be wrong with our criminal justice system, but none of them render Roman Polanski unworthy of a prison stay.

Which is perhaps how we end up with a combination of a very high
incarceration rate, a rather high crime rate, *and* brutal and
inhumane conditions in our prisons. Not good. It ain’t working
at any level.

The great difficulty of the “retribution” principle is that it
isn’t quantitative or amenable to rational analysis. How much
punishment is “enough” to achieve retribution ? There isn’t
some turkey-thermostat that pops out when a prisoner has had
“enough”. Better to leave those judgments to God.

“It isn’t arbitrary to go after pedophiles”

No. What’s arbitrary is to basically *not* go after somebody
for 32 years, and then suddenly get more aggressive. No matter
what you think about sex with a 13-year-old (and in case anyone’s
in doubt, I think it’s a bad idea, though it seems the voters
of New Hampshire aren’t so clear-cur), the on-again off-again
law enforcement is a mess. And the plea-bargain system, which
is to justice as McDonalds is to food, quick and cheap but
hardly admirable, is a mess as well.

I suggest that the message this case sends to fugitives is that our efforts at extradition are tardy, half-hearted, and arbitrary.

So your solution to the tardiness problem is to say that if a fugitive gets away with it for a long enough time, they are out of the woods? Seriously, the real message to fugitives here is that you are going to have to watch your step for the rest of your lives.

And your use of the word “arbitrary” here again belies your pro-pedophile views. It isn’t arbitrary to go after pedophiles because pedophilia is the worst crime imaginable short of murder.

The bottom line is you just don’t think shoving your penis up a 13 year old drugged girl’s anus without her consent is that big a deal. All of the rest of your arguments are window dressing, for your real, disgusting position.

I disagree. For me, making someone suffer is bad, no matter what they’ve done. And it’s
only justifiable if it has other positive effects.

“How about deterring fugitives?”

I suggest that the message this case sends to fugitives is that our efforts at
extradition are tardy, half-hearted, and arbitrary. And as such, we would do
better to let everyone forget about it than to draw attention to a rather shabby
performance over 3 decades.

Also damaging is the appearance that the recent activity was triggered by Polanski
making legal moves to get the case dismissed. Precisely what is the message here:
“you can live safely abroad as long as you keep your mouth shut” ? Is that the
principle of American justice ?

Well, one of the purposes of the criminal justice system is retribution. Making people who do bad things suffer. Yes, part of the reason we do this is for deterrence value, both to deter Polanski and others. But we also do this because it is RIGHT to make someone suffer who did something really bad. Every day that Bernie Madoff spends in the hell that is prison is a day that he spends thinking about the enormity of his actions.

Roman Polanski deserves to sit in a prison cell, where none of his Hollywood and French friends and riches can help him, thinking about how it must have felt for his victim to have some old creep shoving his penis up her anus over her objections. Whether or not that is strictly justified by a cost benefit analysis really isn’t the issue. He belongs there, because he did an awful thing.

Further, it isn’t only about deterring sex crimes. How about deterring fugitives? You have any studies on that.

This thread suggests the penalty for flight would be no more than 1 year,
but also that it may be impermissible to extradite him on the rape charge
and then give him further punishment on other charges.

So the book that gets thrown at Polanski might turn out to be not that big.
I really don’t think the people shouting “lock up the awful pedophile” have
thought this through to its probable conclusion.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=534069

California Penal Code

“Section 1320.5:
Every person who is charged with or convicted of the
commission of a felony, who is released from custody on bail, and who
in order to evade the process of the court willfully fails to appear
as required, is guilty of a felony. Upon a conviction under this
section, the person shall be punished by a fine not exceeding ten
thousand dollars ($10,000) or by imprisonment in the state prison, or
in the county jail for not more than one year, or by both the fine
and imprisonment. Willful failure to appear within 14 days of the
date assigned for appearance may be found to have been for the
purpose of evading the process of the court.”

“Every extradition treaty limits extradition to certain offenses. As a corollary,
all extradition treaties restrict prosecution or punishment of the fugitive to the offense
for which extradition was granted unless (1) the offense was committed after the fugitive’s
extradition or (2) the fugitive remains in the jurisdiction after expiration of a “reasonable time”
(generally specified in the extradition treaty itself) following completion of his punishment.
This limitation is referred to as the Rule of Specialty. Prosecutors who wish to proceed
against an extradited person on charges other than those for which extradition was granted
must contact the Office of International Affairs (OIA) for guidance regarding the availability
of a waiver of the Rule by the sending State.”

Oy. My point is that government policy (including law-enforcement decisions like
this one) should be guided by a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis, not by
chest-beating and the use of emotional arguments. Of course bringing Polanski
back won’t kill 4000 Americans. But it’s an important decision nevertheless,
probably committing us to spending months of court time and millions of dollars
of legal and court costs, plus imprisonment costs if it gets that far, and it
should be taken in a rational way.

As for the “setting an example” argument, I think it’s bunk. It’s not
clear that sex crimes are the result of a rational decision-making process,
indeed, that seems highly implausible. So the example is probably worthless.
And does it really do any good to demonstrate to other potential fugitives
that yeah, maybe eventually after 32 years we’ll get serious about you ?
Much better to just keep quiet about this case and let everyone forget IMO:
it’s never going to be seen as a shining triumph of the American justice
system.

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=KYGTQVhNyZvrWhGJGfM2TvCBF9DT4y9dpkQ25b8LLzPH1B0yrKxP!-1854981251!1330489117?docId=97818899

The Rationality of Sexual Offending: Testing a
Deterrence/Rational Choice Conception of Sexual
Assault

Ronet Bachman

Raymond Paternoster

Sally Ward

“Using a combination of hypothetical scenarios and survey-type ques-
tions, this study investigates the effect of the context of the offense, formal
sanctions, informal sanctions, and moral beliefs on self-reported projections
to commit sexual assault. Male college students read and responded to five
scenarios each describing a hypothetical sexual assault by a male. Respon-
dents were asked to estimate the certainty of formal and informal punish-
ment for the scenario male, the extent to which they believed the male’s ac-
tions were morally wrong, and the likelihood that they would do what the
male did under the same circumstances. We found that projections to com-
mit sexual assault were affected by two circumstances of the incident, the
likelihood that the male would be formally sanctioned (dismissed from the
university or arrested) and the respondent’s moral beliefs. The significant
deterrent effect observed for formal sanction threats was not invariant, how-
ever. The fear of formal sanctions had no effect when respondents were in-
hibited by their moral evaluation of the incident. The deterrent effect of for-
mal sanction threats did not vary by the level of social censure for the
scenario male’s actions. The implications of these finding for previous and
subsequent deterrence research are discussed.”

The difference is, the Iraq War killed 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and cost billions of dollars. The prosecution of Roman Polanski will do nothing of the sort– all it may (or may not) result in is one awful pedophile serving the jail service that his conduct warrants and an example being set for other powerful pedophiles and fugitives of justice.

And the bottom line is, you can always argue that the government has something better to do. But those of us who think that drugging and sodomizing a 13 year old girl, and fleeing justice, are really, really important things would say that there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this.

Finally, on the issue of the fairness of the possible rescission of the plea deal, I would say 2 things: (1) most importantly, Polanski will now have the opportunity to make any prosecutorial / judicial misconduct argument he wishes to make, which is as it should be– what he doesn’t get to do is make such arguments from France; and (2) the plea deal was for a very weak sentence (and by the way, the evidence that he drugged and sodomized this girl is overwhelming and uncontradicted– he had NO serious claim of innocence or he would have gone to trial) so there’s no particular reason that it absolutely HAS to get honored. Still, if the California authorities decide to honor it, justice will still have been served in the sense that Polanski will have at least been forced to face the charges that he tried to flee.

It didn’t mean Saddam was a good guy. It doesn’t mean Polanski is a good guy.
It’s just that sometimes it’s better to live with an imperfect outcome than
to kick up a big fuss that’s likely to achieve nothing of value.

It’s a dumb idea.

No. I’m saying that what matters is not whether Polanski’s act was
“abhorrent”, but whether chasing him down *now*, 32 years later,
will have any positive results that outweigh the very considerable
costs (not least the cost to his wife and two children, who of
course bear no blame for his earlier actions).

In my view, the judgment about what’s “abhorrent” or “immoral” or
“unnatural” or “evil” is one for Polanski’s God, if he has one,
to make. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to help
the victims and to reduce the frequency of future crime. And chasing
Polanski *now* offers little or nothing on either of those counts.

Meanwhile, there are real problems with the way we treat women now
that we might be able to fix or ameliorate, if we weren’t wasting our
time and effort on the Polanski case.

Another way of looking at it is to ask “what do we hope to achieve
when we imprison a criminal ?” We want the victim to feel better;
we want other potential victims to be protected; we want the criminal
to be rehabilitated and become a useful law-abiding citizen.
Well, the victim has forgiven Polanski; he has kept out of trouble
for 30 years, has been married for the last 20 and is prominent and
successful in his career. That’s what we want; we’ve won. Declare
victory and move on.

And, your last paragraph advances the most predictable anti-feminist argument: anyone who cares about women should be off solving all problems of women’s oppression before complaining about any one problem of women’s oppression.

Polanski can seek mercy from the court that will have to deal with him in California, where all the arguments that have been raised here and elsewhere can certainly be made. I can’t think of many if any situations where justice demands that all the arguments get resolved in your favor so that you don’t have to even bother to show up and give some proof. Seriously, the degree of favoritism Polanski seeks is shocking — not just a light sentence, as originally demanded, but complete immunity from legal process.