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=> confounding the Law

confounding the Law
Posted by beezelbub (Guest) - Friday, July 22 2005, 16:31:54 (CEST)
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LONDON (Reuters) - Roman Polanski won his libel case against Vanity Fair on Friday, ending a week-long trial in which he gave video evidence from Paris to avoid extradition to America where he is wanted for having sex with a girl aged 13.

The film director was awarded 50,000 pounds ($87,500) in damages, and his solicitors estimate that Vanity Fair's bill could run as high as 1.5 million pounds.

The 71-year-old went to court in London to sue the magazine's publishers over an article in July 2002 alleging he had tried to seduce a woman in a New York restaurant while on his way to his slain wife's funeral in August 1969.

Vanity Fair conceded the article was inaccurate, saying the incident actually took place weeks after Sharon Tate's murder by followers of the Charles Manson clan, but maintained the gist of the contested passage in the article was true.

"It goes without saying that, whilst the whole episode is a sad one, I am obviously pleased with the jury's verdict today," Polanski said in a statement.

"Three years of my life have been interrupted. Three years within which I have had no choice but to relive the horrible events of August 1969, the murders of my wife, my unborn child and my friends."

Tate was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when she was killed.

Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, told reporters outside the court he found the decision "amazing."

"As a father of four children, one of them a 12-year-old daughter, I find it ... outrageous that this story is considered defamatory given the fact that he cannot be here because he slept with a 13-year-old girl a quarter of a century ago."

Polanski could be extradited from Britain to the United States for his 1977 crime, but not from France, were he was born.

...I understand why Vanity Fair is pissed....it isn't the amount of money, they can afford it and have insurance, it's that Polanski won a case that casts doubt on the accuracy and maybe even the intentions of the magazine.

...The sentiment expressed by the editor is more of the confusion people have about the function of Law in a civil society. People are increasingly willing to let the guarantees to due process slide in their pursuit of "evildoers"...and in the end this will come back to bite us all.

...a fundamental principle of Law and Justice is that a person is to be tried on the case for which charges have been brought and that guilt for another crime, especially a totally unrelated one, has no bearing whatsoever.

The issue isn't Polanski's guilt for statutory rape...the issue at trial was a claim that Vanity Fair'r article, the article, was libellous. It doesn't matter that Polanski is wanted for bank robbery or once killed a man...had the magazine writen any article on Polanski that was true, he would not have had a case...but they wrote something that was not true...that is the issue.

There's an awful big rush to condemn people for their character or morality or religion...anything and everything BUT focusing on the issue at hand...one issue at a time. This is a dangerous precedent...we are toying with denying justice to people for things they have done elswhere or in their past...so that if you are a "bad" person, you need not ever expect fair treatment under the Law from then on. This was the final step on the road to Auschwitz...Jews were "bad", therefore they were not protected by the rule of Law. We're doing it to Muslims now...it doesn't matter if they are guilty of an act...they are guilty by way of their religion...as we present it...and therefore due process doesn't apply.

If you loosen the matrix that holds society together, you will not escape yourself when it collpases...the Germans found that out the hard way.



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