WARSAW — Poland will not extradite Roman Polanski to the United States on charges of having sex with a minor, after Polish prosecutors sided with the director and declined to appeal a court ruling against the extradition. This decision effectively closes the yearlong case of the Oscar-winning director here.
Janusz Hnatko, of the Krakow prosecutor’s office, which sought Mr. Polanski’s extradition on behalf of the United States, said in a statement on Friday that Judge Dariusz Mazur had been “right” to refuse the extradition request and that the justice system in the United States could not be trusted to conduct a fair trial in Mr. Polanski’s case.
As the main faults of the judges and prosecutors in California, Mr. Hnatko cited their “excessive vulnerability” to media criticism; “unethical and disqualifying for the judge conversations about the case with one party without the presence of the other party”; inappropriate internal court emails, called “marching orders,” which pointed to misconduct of the judges; and “loss and destroyal” of crucial court case documents.
A lawyer for Mr. Polanski, Jan Olszewski, said in a telephone interview that the prosecutors’ decision was met with director’s “enormous relief.”
“Polish judges and prosecutors appreciated how many grave mistakes had been made on the U.S. side and exposed its hypocrisy,” Mr. Olszewski said. “Roman and his family can finally take a deep breath.”
Zbigniew Ziobro, a justice minister from the newly elected conservative government in Poland, who previously said that Mr. Polanski should be extradited to the United States, described the prosecutors’ decision as “surprising.”
“After the merger of the prosecutor’s office with the Ministry of Justice, which will happen next year, we’ll examine this decision very thoroughly,” Mr. Ziobro told journalists. If the ministry “finds this decision to be faulty,” the prosecutors responsible for making it may face disciplinary action, though it would not affect the filmmaker.
Mr. Polanski praised Judge Mazur after he ruled at a hearing in Krakow on Oct. 30 that turning over Mr. Polanski would be an “obviously unlawful” deprivation of liberty and that California would be unlikely to provide humane living conditions for the filmmaker.
“Frankly, I was moved,” Mr. Polanski, a Holocaust survivor born to Polish-Jewish parents, told journalists after the ruling.
This legal decision follows Switzerland’s refusal in 2010 to extradite Mr. Polanski over the same decades-old charges involving a 13-year-old girl.
Swiss officials had similar doubts over the conduct of the judge and prosecutor in the original trial in Los Angeles of Mr. Polanski who served 42 days in jail in 1977-78, but fled the United States before final sentencing.
The end of the case in Poland means that Mr. Polanski, 82, is now free to stay and work here. The filmmaker, who was born in Krakow but lives with his wife and two children in France, planned to start shooting a new version of “The Dreyfus Affair” last summer, but had to change his plans due to the court case.
“Roman lives in France and before this case he would travel to Poland for work or sentimental reasons, but for the past year he would come here mainly because of the case,” Mr. Olszewski said. “He’s just happy that it’s off his mind now and he can go back to making his new film.”