[...]
Asked about comments by the Swiss attorney general that suggested technical errors in the U.S. extradition request, Crowley said: "A 13-year-girl was drugged and raped by an adult -- this is not a matter of technicality."
From another source:
The United States failed to provide confidential testimony to refute defense arguments the filmmaker had actually served his sentence before fleeing Los Angeles three decades ago, Widmer-Schlumpf said.
My understanding of the matter, after speaking with someone who works in international law, is that the concern here is that Swiss law required that the US provide some evidence from the trial in '77, and was not complied with. As a result, their legal system required that Polanski go free rather than be extradited. Every person in the courtroom in Switzerland may have been thinking 'god what an evil whiny child-molesting rapist bastard'- but they were still beholden to their own law.
Am I pleased by this? Hell no; the bastard should serve the time, both for child molestation and for evasion of justice. The prosecution in this case- who've become awfully hard to find names for- are responsible for Polanski's freedom- not the Swiss. Additionally, it doesn't make me feel very good realizing HOW incompetent the prosecution of this case was: it's not as if Swiss law was some secret document that the prosecution couldn't read, nor is it as if the Swiss didn't plainly state 'we need this data to be able to extradite'. The prosecution is who you should be pissed off at, here- not Switzerland. All Switzerland did here was the equivalent of telling a cop 'Do you have a search warrant? If not, you can't come into my house'.
I'd figured this one would slide on some fine point of the law or other- I'd just figured that slide would happen inside the US. This is some pretty epically bad use of law- right up there with the folks defending Prop 8's case against gay marriage in recent 9th Circuit appeals court. Christ, maybe I should go into law. I couldn't do much worse than those two examples of idiocy.
