December 4, 2008 | 2:10 pm

Roman Polanski wants sex charges dropped

Posted by Danielle Berrin

You can’t get away with everything in Hollywood—-or can you? Just ask Roman Polanski, who absconded from the country over three decades ago when he was charged with drugging and then having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Despite her pleas to have the charges dropped and the licentious filmmaker’s disturbingly casual admission of guilt, the sex case stamina endured. Now, new evidence revealed in the documentary, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” may provide Polanski’s pedophilia with a get out of jail free card. Or at the very least, a long awaited homecoming to Hollywood.

From Variety:

Polanski’s attorneys cite “extraordinary new evidence” that has surfaced with the release of Marina Zenovich’s “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” as reason to reopen the case. The complaint zeroes in on interviews in which then-deputy district attorney David Wells admits discussing the case with Judge Lawrence Rittenband during legal proceedings from the 1970s and further charges the current District Attorney’s Office with misconduct in statements made upon the docu’s June release.

Polanski, the complaint charges, “was and continues to be the victim of repeated, unlawful and unethical misconduct on the part of the L.A. District Attorney’s Office and L.A. Superior Court.”

A hearing has been set for Jan. 21.

Here’s where The Guardian says it better:

His lawyers have fixed on fresh evidence uncovered in a new documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, that highlights “a pattern of misconduct and improper communications” between the district attorney’s office and Judge Rittenband. In other words the grounds for dismissal appear to be based not on any doubt over Polanski’s guilt (so far as I can tell, there isn’t any) but on the suggestion that the subsequent trial was not handled as spotlessly as it might have been. On such technicalities are guilty men recast as heroes.

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