In an L.A. Times article about the ruling of the 2nd District Court of Appeal in the Roman Polanski case, I came upon this startling little paragraph:

His supporters have said that the month and a half that he spent in state prison the year of his crime was enough and that he should be released without additional time in custody. A recent Times analysis of court records showed that most defendants in similar cases since 2004 received sentences of a year or more.

I don’t know how the newspaper defined “similar cases”, but there doesn’t seem to be any dispute that the crime Polanski is charged with consists of first drugging and then raping a 13-year-old girl.

And “a year or more” is certainly a vague and open-ended phrase.

However, unless the L.A. Times is being deliberately dishonest — and that doesn’t appear to be so from the context — the implication is that the typical sentence for drugging and raping an underage girl is not much longer than one year.

That’s simply outrageous.