Why the renewed interest in extraditing Polanski?

WASHINGTON — Roman Polanski, the famed film director arrested in Zurich under a U.S. extradition request, has a perverse ability to bring out the worst in the judicial system. He must be thinking that the characters in his legal rigmarole resemble those incomprehensible creatures in his masterpieces who tell us normality does not exist.

This should have been a straightforward case. Polanski was accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, spent a short time in jail, admitted to the charges and entered a plea bargain. But then stuff happened. Backtracking, Judge Laurence Rittenband, a publicity maniac, signaled to Polanski's attorneys that he would not abide by his deal with the prosecutors. By tipping him off a day before sentencing him in 1978, the judge incited him to flee. Polanski, a man who knows a thing or two about the bizarre, did just that.

Rittenband was removed from the case, but his successor, Paul Breckenridge, refused to sentence Polanski in absentia on the grounds that it would have been "idle" because France would never hand him over. He did not explain why the warrant for the director's arrest was not idle on the same grounds.

When his victim became an adult, she reached an arrangement with Polanski — with the backing of her family, who had initiated the case, she asked the courts to give it up. This made irrelevant the defense's contention that the girl's mother had encouraged the relationship.

Meanwhile, Polanski crisscrossed Europe making movies and winning awards. No effort was made to have him extradited. In fact, the Los Angeles prosecutors themselves told his U.S. lawyers that they were not actively pursuing him.

In 2005, the extradition request was suddenly reactivated. Even then no serious effort was made to enforce it. Polanski continued to move about and visit Switzerland, where he owned a home in Gstaad, a ski town with a dizzying number of famous people per square mile.

The latest attempt to have the case dismissed, partly on evidence of judicial malpractice revealed in a documentary film in 2008, met with a mind-boggling ruling by Judge Peter Espinoza: Polanski had most probably been the victim of judicial misconduct, but the charges stood. None of the elements pointing to the futility of the case — including a 10-year statute of limitations for the crime — was apparently persuasive enough.

Polanski continued to move in and out of Switzerland without the slightest encumbrance — until a few days ago when suddenly the United States and Switzerland remembered that justice needed to be done.