Polanski asks prosecutor to review film’s claims

In the film, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the former prosecutor, David Wells, describes advising Judge Laurence J Rittenband to send Polanski to prison for a psychiatric review, though Wells was not involved with the case.

Wells also points out to the judge, who died in 1993, what Wells considered defiant behaviour by Polanski. Wells, in an interview in the film, says he showed Judge Rittenband a photograph of Polanski with two girls taken in Germany before his sentencing. “‘Judge’, I said, ‘Look here. He’s flipping you off’,” Wells recalled. Polanski has been a fugitive since 1978 when he fled to France to avoid a possible prison sentence or deportation.

In a phone interview on Tuesday, his lawyer, Douglas Dalton, said Wells’s self-described contacts with the judge appeared to violate California law and legal ethics. At the time, Wells worked in the Santa Monica courthouse of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, but, after some initial involvement, he was not assigned to the Polanski case.

“There could be a motion to dismiss based on prosecutorial misconduct,” Dalton said.

“We want to develop information about the extent of the ex parte contacts, what other communications Wells had, whether anybody else was aware of them, that sort of thing.”

In general, Dalton acknowledged, fugitives have little standing to press conventional appeals. But, he said, California law would permit either a judge or the prosecutor’s office to seek remedies on behalf of Polanski, including dismissal of the case, if either believed the judicial process had been corrupted.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles district attorney, Stephen L Cooley, said she was not aware of any plan by Cooley’s office to change its stance in the case because of Wells’s comments.

In a phone interview from his home on Tuesday, Wells denied that his contact with the judge had been improper, saying it occurred in open court during routine discussions of cases.

“I didn’t tell him to do it or that he should do it,” Wells said of the judge’s decision to put Polanski in prison for 42 days for psychiatric review. “I just told him what his options were.”

Charles Whitebread, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said it would be unusual for a judge to reopen the case. “That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be justified or couldn’t happen,” he said.

In an e-mail message this week, Polanski, 74, said he would not make any decisions until Dalton had finished review.