The two sets of horrific murders carried out by Charles Manson and his besotted followers in August 1969 were nightmarish — yet all too real. Among the seven victims was 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate, the wife of film director Roman Polanski. She was 8 ½ months pregnant when she was stabbed to death, and the child she was carrying — posthumously named .Paul Richard Polanski — was later buried with her, in her arms.
Roman Polanski, then 35, had been in London at the time of the murders. After returning to California, he was questioned at length by police and endured a tense period of waiting before a boast to another jail inmate by Susan Atkins, a member of the Manson gang, led to the arrest of the killers.
Polanski resumed his directing career, working mostly in Europe, though in 1974 he returned to Hollywood to direct the iconic film noir Chinatown. Five years later, he directed a haunting version of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. According to Wikipedia, the idea for the film had come from Sharon Tate not long before her death, when she left a copy of the book and a note on Polanski’s nightstand. Tess starred Nastassja Kinski, with whom Polanski was romantically involved at the time.
Art and life entwined again in 2002, when Polanski directed The Pianist, based on the autobiography of Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman. Like Szpilman, Polanski evaded the ghetto and concentration camps while many family members perished there.
The Motion Picture Academy awarded the Oscar for best director to Polanski for The Pianist, but he did not attend the ceremony in Hollywood because he feared arrest. In 1977, he had been charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles and eventually pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Before he could be sentenced, however, Polanski fled to London and then France. From then on, he was careful to live and work only in countries where he was not likely to be arrested and extradited to the United States.
One of those countries, Polanski thought, was Switzerland, where he owns a home in the resort town of Gstaad. But in September 2009, at the Zurich Film Festival, Swiss police arrested Polanski, now 76, at the request of U.S. authorities.
On November 25, a Swiss judge granted Polanski’s request to be released on $4.5 million bail until the question of his extradition to the United States is resolved. He will be on electronic monitoring, confined to his home in Gstaad. The bail decision surprised several American commentators, one of whom (Laurie Levenson) likened it to giving bail to O.J. Simpson in 1994 after the infamous Bronco chase.
Levenson’s reasoning is eminently logical: once a flight risk always a flight risk. But there are also elements that tend to distinguish the two cases. O.J. wasn’t on electronic monitoring, he wasn’t 76 years old, and he was facing murder charges, not a 32-year-old conviction for statutory rape.
As elements of tragedy swirl around Polanski’s life yet again, the law’s long arm makes for an underlying irony. In the aftermath of Sharon Tate’s murder, her mother was determined to make herself heard within the judicial system regarding the sentencing of those responsible for her daughter’s death. In the early 1980s, this played an important role in inspiring what we now know as the victims’ rights movement. And yet in continuing to pursue the case against Polanski, the California authorities may be ignoring the wishes of the victim, who is now 45 and could very well just want to move on with her life.
One other note about the case: The Huffington Post reported that after Polanski was arrested in September, an “edit war” broke out on Wikipedia, the free, reader-edited online encyclopedia. The editors had to freeze further editing of Polanski’s entry, because reader-editors could not find their way through the controversy to common ground. As empowering and informative as Wiki is, sometimes it’s necessary to have an old-fashioned editor after all.
Showing posts with label victims' rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label victims' rights. Show all posts
Friday, November 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
The Crime Victims' Act at 25
This is National Crime Victims’ Rights Week. Events will be taking place across the country, as they have every year since 1981. President Obama's proclamation notes that this is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Victims of Crime Act of 1984, which imposed various fines and other financial penalties on federal offenders to fund services for victims. The silver anniversary of such a laudable and historically momentous ongoing event should be more widely celebrated.
In world historical terms, the respect for victims represented by the victims’ rights movement is nothing less than astonishing. As Gil Bailie argues in Violence Unveiled, the awakening of empathy for victims in cultures influenced by the Gospels is the paramount driver of Western history. Throughout human history, human victims were considered expendable. When primitive religion needed a scapegoat to make society cohesive, no one was prepared to look too closely at the victims that made this cohesion possible.
In the Hebrew bible, however, and to a lesser degree in Greek tragedy, moral concern about the victims’ plight began to find expression. Then came the story of Jesus – a common criminal, subjected to a common execution, whose story the Gospels told in a way that, in fits and starts, began to turn the world upside down. The moral high ground, it turned out, was with this hapless victim, not the worldly powers who put him to death.
By the 1980s, when the Crime Victims' Act was passed, concern about victims had become so prevalent in the US that a considerable backlash had set in against the excesses of political correctness. PC had given rise to a type of Victomology that the critic Robert Hughes called a “culture of complaint.”
In 1987, I remember wondering about President Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical response to the senseless death of 37 sailors aboard he USS Stark who were mistakenly killed by an Iraq missile in the Persian Gulf. This was during the Iran-Iraq War, in which the US backed Iraq, so in essence the deaths were from friendly fire. Yet Reagan sought to elevate the randomly fallen sailors into full-fledged heroes. This was the same Reagan who not only signed the Victims' Rights Act, but who created a major controversy the following year by visiting SS graves in Bitburg and trying to recast Hitler’s storm troopers as victims of Nazism. (These episodes are recounted in Joseph A. Amato’s A History and a Theory of Suffering.)
One wishes Reagan had shown equal concern for the victims of Salvadoran death squads supported by the US military, but his reinterpretation of the victim / hero dynamic speaks volumes about our culture. Marginalized for millennia of human history, victims have now more and more moved to a central place as the Gospel unmasks the old scapegoating machinery.
I am not sure, however, that “rights” is the right terminology in which to cast this astounding reversal of victims’ status. At Valparaiso University School of Law, my jurisprudence professor, Richard Stith, taught me to be skeptical of the insistence on rights that permeates American society. Would it build more community, and yield better results, if we turned the equation around and spoke instead of duties?
After all, “rights” is not the only powerful word starting with R. Think of:
● Restoration (as in the restorative justice movement )
● Respect (as in dignity)
● Reconciliation (a deeply religious term)
● Recognition (with its Hegelian undertones)
And finally — the most powerful of all the R words for me — Resurrection!
I think of the Olson family in Minnesota. Rolf, Nancy, Sarah, and Karl lost their beloved daughter / sister Katherine to the demonic evil of the “Craig’s list killer,” who shot the vivacious 24-year-old in cold blood and left her to bleed to death stuffed in the trunk of her own car. At sentencing, her family spoke openly of their deep emotional wounds, of how the killer had stolen their future. Faced with this kind of excruciating pain and indescribable loss, the language of “victims’ rights” pales — and the Resurrection becomes an urgent hope.
In world historical terms, the respect for victims represented by the victims’ rights movement is nothing less than astonishing. As Gil Bailie argues in Violence Unveiled, the awakening of empathy for victims in cultures influenced by the Gospels is the paramount driver of Western history. Throughout human history, human victims were considered expendable. When primitive religion needed a scapegoat to make society cohesive, no one was prepared to look too closely at the victims that made this cohesion possible.
In the Hebrew bible, however, and to a lesser degree in Greek tragedy, moral concern about the victims’ plight began to find expression. Then came the story of Jesus – a common criminal, subjected to a common execution, whose story the Gospels told in a way that, in fits and starts, began to turn the world upside down. The moral high ground, it turned out, was with this hapless victim, not the worldly powers who put him to death.
By the 1980s, when the Crime Victims' Act was passed, concern about victims had become so prevalent in the US that a considerable backlash had set in against the excesses of political correctness. PC had given rise to a type of Victomology that the critic Robert Hughes called a “culture of complaint.”
In 1987, I remember wondering about President Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical response to the senseless death of 37 sailors aboard he USS Stark who were mistakenly killed by an Iraq missile in the Persian Gulf. This was during the Iran-Iraq War, in which the US backed Iraq, so in essence the deaths were from friendly fire. Yet Reagan sought to elevate the randomly fallen sailors into full-fledged heroes. This was the same Reagan who not only signed the Victims' Rights Act, but who created a major controversy the following year by visiting SS graves in Bitburg and trying to recast Hitler’s storm troopers as victims of Nazism. (These episodes are recounted in Joseph A. Amato’s A History and a Theory of Suffering.)
One wishes Reagan had shown equal concern for the victims of Salvadoran death squads supported by the US military, but his reinterpretation of the victim / hero dynamic speaks volumes about our culture. Marginalized for millennia of human history, victims have now more and more moved to a central place as the Gospel unmasks the old scapegoating machinery.
I am not sure, however, that “rights” is the right terminology in which to cast this astounding reversal of victims’ status. At Valparaiso University School of Law, my jurisprudence professor, Richard Stith, taught me to be skeptical of the insistence on rights that permeates American society. Would it build more community, and yield better results, if we turned the equation around and spoke instead of duties?
After all, “rights” is not the only powerful word starting with R. Think of:
● Restoration (as in the restorative justice movement )
● Respect (as in dignity)
● Reconciliation (a deeply religious term)
● Recognition (with its Hegelian undertones)
And finally — the most powerful of all the R words for me — Resurrection!
I think of the Olson family in Minnesota. Rolf, Nancy, Sarah, and Karl lost their beloved daughter / sister Katherine to the demonic evil of the “Craig’s list killer,” who shot the vivacious 24-year-old in cold blood and left her to bleed to death stuffed in the trunk of her own car. At sentencing, her family spoke openly of their deep emotional wounds, of how the killer had stolen their future. Faced with this kind of excruciating pain and indescribable loss, the language of “victims’ rights” pales — and the Resurrection becomes an urgent hope.
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