"He did not flee to avoid prosecution for the crime; he did not even flee to avoid sentencing, at first: after being allowed to travel abroad to complete a film project in the interval between trial and sentencing, he returned to the US on his own recognizance to accept a sentence in the case in which his guilty plea had already been recorded. The problem arose when the judge in the trial made public statements prior to the sentencing hearing, to the effect that he intended to ignore Polanski's plea bargain and sentence him to the maximum after Polanski had already been assured he would be given a lesser sentence in return for his plea. The same judge had already abused his discretion by arranging to have Polanski held in maximum security for 42 days before his conviction, supposedly for a "psychological evaluation" that should have taken a day or two. Later it developed that the a prosecutor had been holding ex parte communications with the judge, convincing him that Polanski deserved further punishment because he had been seen attending an Oktoberfest while overseas before his sentencing. (I am not aware that his OR release explicitly prohibited ostentatious beer-drinking.)"
"So Polanksi had demonstrated himself more than willing to submit to justice, to make compensation, and to abide by the terms of his agreement with the court: he had pled guilty, accepted in principle the sentence that was proposed, returned from overseas expressly to accept his sentence, and later gave an agreed-upon settlement to the victim of his crime. The problem was that the prosecutor who had made the agreement with Polanski an officer of the court then worked secretly to undermine it before it could be upheld, and the judge had not only had arbitrarily abused him but openly intended to do so again. After Polanski had demonstrated he was cooperative and had kept his agreement, and the justice system had strongly indicated they would not act likewise, he fled to avoid being double-crossed on the agreement he had honestly entered into. After that, it turned into a pissing contest between Polanski and the LA court system: he made repeated attempts to resolve his case from abroad, or at least transfer it to a US court that hadn't already railroaded him once, and they insisted he had to return to the same court system that had lied to him the first time, with no guarantee they would not do so again."