Things had not been looking good in recent months for Roman Polanski and he had received several blows in his ongoing and protracted legal battles.
The filmmaker has been under house arrest in a Swiss chalet for around eight months while awaiting his fate regarding the 33-year-old unlawful sex charges against him, and the clock was running out.
American prosecutors had been pushing hard for his extradition to the United States, and it seemed they’d be getting their way. Swiss authorities have been waiting for appeals and counter-appeals to be filed before making a decision, but they finally made one today.
Polanski will not be extradited to face sentencing. At a news conference today, the Swiss Authorities said, “The reason for the decision lies in the fact that it was not possible to exclude with the necessary certainty a fault in the U.S. extraditionary request,” according to Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf of the Swiss Justice Ministry .
This essentially means this battle is over for the filmmaker and he’s a free man. “I ask only to be treated fairly like anyone else,” Polanski said in May. But while he will certainly not be setting foot in the U.S. voluntarily in his lifetime it doesn’t mean the drama is entirely over – it’s conceivable if he travels to another country, he could be arrested there and that country could decide to extradite him. However U.S. authorities had planned his September 2009 arrest carefully, so one would assume he’ll be extremely wary of any future international travel plans for the remainder of his life. The U.S. authorities may very well try and appeal this decision, but at this point, it might not do much good.
Hope he makes "God of Carnage" now.