What's surprising about Roman Polanski's arrest isn't that it happened 32 years late, it's that police waited for him to make an actual border crossing before they arrested him on that 32-year-old warrant.
The director of "Chinatown" and "The Pianist" was detained Saturday at Zürich Airport en route to the Zurich Film Festival, on a warrant given to Swiss authorities a few days earlier by the U.S. Justice Department by request of the Los Angeles county district attorney's office. Polanski fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and serving 42 days in prison, not returning even to accept his Best Director Oscar for "The Pianist" at the Academy Awards in 2003. ]]>