Let's try and focus on what this dispute is really about:

1. He spent 6 weeks in jail
2. He plead guilty to one charge, the others were dropped in exchange for his plea, so he is not guilty of those, regardless of what anyone says;
3. It was a condition of his plea that he receive credit for the time already spent in jail and that he would not spend anymore time in jail;
4. Another prosecutor, who was not involved in the case, coached the judge, without other counsel knowing, and convinced him to throw out the plea deal;
5. That was when Polanski fled - after the system was corrupted; and,
6. The same renegade prosecutor is the one that just leaked the Grand Jury testimony to ABC (and is the only one interviewed in the article).

Noone is defending sex with under-age girls (at least nobody who is sane), but you can't say that the whole process surrounding the punishment phase of Polanski's trial wasn't tainted.

As to you folks that argue that the jail time is too little. Maybe you're right, but the fact is, his crime does not merit the death penalty (despite what many would understandably wish), so he would have received a finite amount of jail time.

The prosecution and the defence agreed on the appropriate length of punishment. Whether you think that was right or not, they had a plea deal that was (apparently) within the sentencing guidelines