OJ Simpson’s Lawyer Is Helping Roman Polanski Get His Rape Case Thrown Out

All this Bill Cosby news has probably been great for Roman Polanski, who most recently escaped a US extradition attempt in Poland in October. But now, with Cosby laying down covering fire, Polanski has apparently shifted to a more aggressive strategy. Former OJ lawyer (and Patty Hearst, and Julian Assange) Alan Dershowitz is petitioning to act on Polanski’s behalf to have the 1978 rape case resolved.

In connection with a Los Angeles County Superior Court filing on Monday, Mr. Dershowitz, who is based in Massachusetts, is asking permission to represent Mr. Polanski in California.

The filing charged prosecutors with providing false information to support a recent attempt to have Mr. Polanski extradited from Poland. It also demanded a hearing aimed at closing his case, based partly on fresh testimony that a Superior Court judge, in 2009, had unethically prejudged issues related to Mr. Polanski’s prosecution, and had a secret plan to jail him at least briefly, even while limiting his actual sentence to time served. […]

In an affidavit filed with the new motion, a former public information officer of the court, Allan Parachini, describes encounters and emails that, he said, showed Judge Espinoza to have prejudged issues that had not yet been argued in court. A spokeswoman for the superior court declined to comment because the case was pending.

Mr. Parachini’s affidavit also repeated his claim, published last year in The Los Angeles Daily Journal, that Judge Espinoza had expressed willingness to limit Mr. Polanski’s sentence to the time he had spent in prison. But, Mr. Parachini wrote, the judge had decided first to let Mr. Polanski “cool his heels in jail” by delaying that ruling for weeks should he return.

In a statement, Mr. Dershowitz said he intended “to see that the integrity of the criminal justice system is preserved and to stop any further misstatements from our government to European nations” regarding the status of Mr. Polanski, who, he said, “has taken responsibility for his actions, served his sentence, and a remedy should now by fashioned by the court once and for all.” [NYTimes]

When even this supposedly horribly biased judge wasn’t going to sentence him to more prison time, maybe it’s time to come back and get this taken care of. Or, you know, continuing chilling in your Swiss chalet. To be honest, both options seem pretty nice.

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