The case surrounding the arrest of director Roman Polanski has both supporters and critics.

Jeffrey Toobin | BIO
AC360° Contributor
New Yorker

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF LAW about Roman Polanski. Writer describes Polanksi’s arrest in 1977 by Detective Philip Vannatter. Polanski was accused of raping Samantha Gailey, a thirteen-year-old girl. On August 8, 1977, pursuant to a plea bargain, Polanski pleaded guilty to the least serious of the charges against him, statutory rape. On the eve of his sentencing hearing, which was scheduled for February 1, 1978, Polanski fled to Europe and has not returned. Earlier this year, on September 26, he was arrested in Switzerland after the American authorities made a provisional request for his arrest. After spending sixty-seven days at a Zurich detention center, Polanski was transferred to house arrest at his chalet in the ski resort of Gstaad on Friday. Polanski is one of the most famous fugitives from American justice in the word. The question of whether Polanski’s celebrity has helped or hurt him hovers over his long legal battle. In Polanski’s case, the effect of his celebrity was doubly, and inconsistently, pernicious; it obscured both how badly Polanski treated his young victim, and how badly the legal system treated him. Tells about Polanski’s early life: his escape from the Warsaw ghetto and his career as a director. Polanski came to Hollywood in 1963. He married Sharon Tate in 1968. Tells about Tate’s murder by members of Charles Manson’s “family.” Describes the events leading up to Polanski’s sexual encounter with Samantha Gailey, whom he was ostensibly photographing for a feature on adolescent girls in Vogue Hommes. Discusses the legal case that followed in detail. Polanski was represented by Douglas Dalton; Gailey by Lawrence Silver; the judge was Laurence J. Rittenband. Considers how criminal sentencing has changed in California since the nineteen-seventies and gives an account of the legal wranglings that preceded Polanski’s flight. Polanski’s status as a fugitive has made it difficult, but not impossible, for him to continue to direct major films. Describes various attempts by Polanski’s lawyers to broker a resolution. In 2003, Polanki won the Oscar for Best Director for “The Pianist.” Mentions Marina Zenovich’s documentary, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.” Gives an account of the events leading up to Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland and describes the public response after he was arrested: the initial support for Polanski from other celebrities and the backlash that followed. It appears likely that at some point Polanski will be returned to California, and there he will face a legal situation of daunting complexity. Describes how Polanski continued to work on his new film, “The Ghost,” from his prison cell. The movie will be released, on schedule, next year.

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CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says Tiger Woods is under no obligation to talk with police.

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

State police in Florida planned Monday to further investigate a single-vehicle crash involving pro golfer Tiger Woods, they said.

That followed a police announcement Sunday that Woods had canceled a third interview with investigators.

Woods suffered minor injuries in the accident, which occurred early Friday in his luxury neighborhood near Orlando. In a statement issued Sunday afternoon on his Web site, Woods offered no details of his wreck, except to say he had cuts and bruises and was "pretty sore."

"This situation is my fault, and it's obviously embarrassing to my family and me," he said. "I'm human, and I'm not perfect. I will certainly make sure this doesn't happen again."

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Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

Abortion is almost as old as childbirth. There has always been a need for some women to end their pregnancies. In modern times, the law’s attitude toward that need has varied. In the United States, at the time the Constitution was adopted, abortions before “quickening” were both legal and commonplace, often performed by midwives. In the nineteenth century, under the influence of the ascendant medical profession, which opposed abortion (and wanted to control health care), states began to outlaw the procedure, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was all but uniformly illegal. The rise of the feminist movement led to widespread efforts to decriminalize abortion, and in 1973 the Supreme Court found, in Roe v. Wade, that the Constitution prohibited the states from outlawing it.

Throughout this long legal history, the one constant has been that women have continued to have abortions. The rate has declined slightly in recent years, but, according to the Guttmacher Institute, thirty-five per cent of all women of reproductive age in America today will have had an abortion by the time they are forty-five. It might be assumed that such a common procedure would be included in a nation’s plan to protect the health of its citizens. In fact, the story of abortion during the past decade has been its separation from other medical services available to women. Abortion, as the academics like to say, is being marginalized.

The latest evidence comes from the House of Representatives, which two weekends ago narrowly passed its health-care bill, by a vote of 220 to 215. One reason that the Democrats won back control of Congress is that the Party adopted a “big tent” philosophy on abortion. The implications of that approach became clear when, during the health-care vote, the House considered a last-minute amendment by Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, which proposed scrubbing the bill of government subsidies for abortion procedures. It passed 240 to 194, with sixty-four Democrats voting in favor.

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The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is 'perhaps the biggest challenge in the history of federal law enforcement'

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

The federal courts face an unprecedented challenge in trying accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo detainees for the terrorist attacks that took 3,000 lives, says CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and four other Guantanamo detainees are being transferred to New York to face trial in a civilian court for the September 11 attacks, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday.

They will face trial in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York - a short distance from the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed in the September 11 attacks. Holder said he expects the government to seek the death penalty in the cases.

Mohammed is the confessed organizer of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. But his confession could be called into question during trial. A 2005 Justice Department memo - released by the Obama administration - revealed he had been waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, a technique that President Obama has called torture.

CNN spoke with Toobin on Friday morning. A former assistant U.S. attorney, Toobin is a senior analyst for CNN and author of "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court."

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Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

Cabinet members may end up negotiating which legal system will try Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspect in last week's mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said Tuesday.

Thirteen people - 12 of them soldiers - were killed and 42 wounded Thursday when a gunman opened fire at the post's Soldier Readiness Center. A police officer shot Hasan, the only suspect, ending the carnage.

Hasan remains in intensive care at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, but is breathing on his own and talking, hospital spokesman Dewey Mitchell said.

Toobin addressed questions about the case Tuesday morning.

CNN: In which legal system will Hasan be tried?

Jeffrey Toobin: We know for certain it will not be in state court. There's exclusive federal jurisdiction on an Army base. They will have to decide whether they want to do it as a court-martial or as a federal prosecution in United States District Court.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight for more from Jeffrey Toobin on Sen. Kennedy's influence on the Supreme Court. AC360° 10 p.m. ET.

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

The vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor last month was sixty-eight to thirty-one—but the one senator who was missing may have had more influence over the Supreme Court than any in history. Edward M. Kennedy won election in 1962, voted on every nominee from Abe Fortas in 1965 to Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2005, and to an unprecedented extent shaped the composition of the Court itself.

Early in his tenure, in 1969 and 1970, Kennedy helped lead the fight to defeat two of President Nixon’s nominees, Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, both of whom lost by narrow margins. In 1971, Kennedy was one of only twenty-six senators to oppose the nomination of William H. Rehnquist as an associate justice. (Kennedy voted against Rehnquist for Chief Justice, too, in 1986).

Still, the summit of Kennedy’s influence on the Court—and perhaps his career as a senator—was his role in the fight over Robert H. Bork’s nomination in 1987. Kennedy was fifty-five at the time, his dreams of the Presidency having been put away for good nearly a decade earlier. At the time, Kennedy had little to gain politically by leading the opposition to Bork, but he did it nonetheless, and he did it with a passion that has defined Supreme Court fights ever since.

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Sonia Sotomayor appears to view the Constitution much like retired Justice David Souter did.

Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Senior Analyst

One of the enduring myths about Supreme Court justices is that they often turn out to "surprise" the presidents who appoint them. Sure-thing conservatives, it is said, turn out to be liberals, ­and vice versa. In fact, the evidence is almost entirely the opposite: that with justices, as in life, what you see is what you get.

The question, then, is this: What do you see when you look at Sonia Sotomayor, who begins her confirmation hearings as a strong favorite for confirmation?

She is, above all, a veteran judge ­who has 18 years on the federal bench: six as a trial judge (appointed by President George H.W. Bush) and the rest on the court of appeals (appointed by President Clinton). The question of competence is closed. Sotomayor can do the job. It's no surprise that she received a unanimous rating of well-qualified from the American Bar Association screening committee.

But what would she stand for as a Supreme Court justice? She is, it seems, a liberal,­ but a liberal in the cautious and careful mode of her likely future colleagues Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

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AC360°

Erica and Anderson have been reminiscing about their first concerts. Anderson couldn’t remember if his was Grandmaster Flash, the Furious Five or Elvis Costello. Erica admitted she saw Peter, Paul, and Mary with her dad.

That got all of us thinking about our own first concerts. What was yours?

We asked you to guess the first concerts of AC360° Contributors.

Here are some answers.

David Gergen: "That was a long time ago - maybe the late 50s - and I can't remember whether it was Perry Como or Bo Diddley - or whether I was wearing white shoes or a bomber jacket."

Tom Foreman: "My first real concert was a whopper: Elvis Presley when I was 16 years old." Read Tom Foreman's post on his experience here.

Jeffrey Toobin: "I went to a Chicago concert at Madison Square Garden. At the end of the concert, everyone lit matches and held them in the air. I thought this was evidence that this was the greatest concert ever. (I didn't realize this was done at every concert, all the time.)"

Gloria Borger: "I remember my fist concert. It was Livingston Taylor, and I went with my (now) husband while we were in college. Too bad I was really disappointed because I thought he was taking me to see James Taylor, his brother. It turned out to be fine, although the only song I can remember now is "Carolina Day," which I would swear is a James Taylor song. But it's not; I looked it up. The next concert event was much better: The Chambers Brothers. I recall the only song they played was "Time Has Come Today." In fact, I think the set isn't over yet!"

Lisa Bloom: Eagles, Hollywood, 1979, under a hazy pot cloud wafting over the amphitheater. Lighters (before cell phones) dotting the darkness. Peaceful, easy feeling, dude. And can you guess David Gergen’s? Post your guess here and we’ll tell you the answer tonight.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

Sixth Catholic. Second woman. Third New Yorker. (First from the Bronx. Ruth Bader Ginsburg hails from Brooklyn, Antonin Scalia from Queens.) First Hispanic. It’s understandable and appropriate to examine Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court according to the customary demographic designations. And it’s interesting, too, to learn (as we will at great length) about her remarkable personal story. (Raised in a single-parent home, in a housing project; summa cum laude at Princeton; Yale Law School; prosecutor under Robert Morgenthau.)

But it’s worth noting that the things we talk about now, during the confirmation process, tend to mean little down the road, when it really counts. John Paul Stevens had the opposite of a hard-luck story. (Raised in a luxury hotel in Chicago—the Stevens Hotel.) The question about Anthony Kennedy was whether he had resigned at the appropriate time from a restricted club. The National Organization for Women put out a leaflet that said, “Stop Souter—Or Women Will Die.” All of this was either irrelevant or (as with Souter) simply wrong. Only on rare occasions do we learn things of real importance—as we did, in 1991, about Clarence Thomas.

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Anderson Cooper talks with his panel about a Gitmo detainee coming to the United States for trial.

Program Note: Tune in tonight to hear more from Jeffrey Toobin tonight on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Senior Legal Analyst

Today the House gave Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) his way when it passed the gun measure he attached to the credit card bill. (The Senate passed it Tuesday.) The provision allows visitors to national parks to carry loaded weapons if the weapons would be legal in the rest of the state. Bottom line: Both plastic-carrying and pistol-packing Americans get new protections under the legislation headed to President Obama’s desk.

In a written statement, Sen. Coburn said he wanted park visitors to be able to defend themselves against crime. We’ll have to take him at his word, but we can’t help noting that National Parks have some of the lowest crime rates in the United States.

Supporters of the gun provision also argued the amendment eliminates confusion about where gun owners can carry their weapons. Here’s what they’re talking about: Starting in the 80s, park visitors were allowed to bring guns inside parks only if they were dismantled or unloaded and stored in a car trunk. That federal rule applied even in states where people could carry a loaded gun in other public places. In January, just before leaving office, President Bush overturned the ban on loaded weapons in national parks. But in March, a district judge struck down his move, pending a required environmental impact study. Today, the tables turned again, producing a high-five moment for President Bush and gun lobbyists.

So does this open the door for the gun lobby to push for even greater gains? Will hospitals and schools remain off-limits to loaded guns? It’s an open question. In a well-known case from 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal law barring guns within a certain distance of schools. The conservative majority said these kinds of laws were a state issue, not a federal issue.

Complicating matters further, there is last year’s landmark gun control decision. Just shy of a year ago, the Supreme Court justices, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that a sweeping ban on handguns in Washington D.C. violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms. With that decision, the justices raised the question of whether any kind of gun control is constitutional under the court’s new reading of the Second Amendment.

The House passed the gun provision with the support of 174 Republicans and 105 Democrats. They’ve given us a lot to talk about tonight on 360.

So have their colleagues in the other chamber.

In an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 90-6, the Senate passed a measure to prevent Guantanamo detainees from coming to the U.S. (A similar amendment has already passed in the House.) It’s a blow to President Obama, who said he would close the Guantanamo Bay facility by Jan. 22, 2010. The Senate wants Mister Obama to spell out exactly what he will do with the detainees once the facility closes. At the same time, many are making it clear that they don’t want the detainees anywhere near their communities, ever. Period. Why not? According to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the country isn’t set up to handle terrorist detainees. “We don’t have the facilities for it,” he said. “Nowhere does.”

Reality check: Convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid, blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and Oklahoma City bombing mastermind Timothy McVeigh were all housed in U.S. prisons. What’s more, no one has even tried to escape from a super-maximum security U.S. prison. The math doesn’t add up either. Guantanamo Bay is the most expensive prison in the world, considering it’s in Cuba and we have to import every single quart of milk that goes there.

There are other reasons at play in this debate. Some believe that U.S. criminal courts aren’t adequate for trying suspected terrorists because of concerns about intelligence breaches. There are also concerns that once the detainees are here, they could sue the U.S government more easily. And many are worried about housing them with other prisoners, who might make willing terrorist recruits.

We’ll be talking about all of this tonight. See you then.

Editor's Note: A Minnesota judge issued an arrest warrant Tuesday for the mother of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy who is refusing treatment for his cancer, after neither she nor the boy showed up for a court appearance.

Doctors say Daniel Hauser's lymphoma responded well to a first round of chemotherapy in February.

Anderson Cooper spoke with CNN Senior Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin and Arthur Caplan, Chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Cooper: Dr. Caplan, is this a tough call for you?

Dr. Caplan: It's not a tough call for me, Anderson. When you compel treatment, it has to be something that's well established and proven. This is. The chemotherapy success rate for the cancer that this boy has, if we can get it going soon, is about 95%. It's very, very good. You wouldn't push as hard if you had an experimental treatment or something that was iffy. Other facts, if you look at the situation with the chemotherapy, the alternative the parents proposed is well known to have a success rate of zero. So sometimes you can say, well, you know, the parents prefer surgery. We prefer chemo. Let's go with what they want first. you've got to move to save this child's life. Parental rights are strong, but they do have a limit when you're basically sacrificing your child for a religious belief that they themselves can't articulate.

Cooper: Dr. Caplan, though, it may be tough to actually give this boy treatment. He's saying he's going to kick and refuse, you know, and make it difficult for doctors to put any needles in him. How do you deal with that?

Dr. Caplan: Well, I'll tell you, I've seen these cases. What happens is, you've got the dad who's already started to come around and say maybe chemo. They'll work with a psychologist. They will try very hard to bring the boy around. And I will tell you, Anderson, there's a lot of success in sort of swaying people once they understand and see one of their parents start to waver. I've never seen a case where you actually had to strap a child down and sedate them and administer chemotherapy that way. Could happen, but most of the time when parents begin to sort of change their minds and the dad is here, you get the kid to come on, too.

Cooper: Art, are you surprised to hear that maybe the dad is starting to change his mind, or you say that's what often happens in these cases?

Dr. Caplan: It often happens that way. When you're really up against it and you start to realize the doctors are saying this is the cure and you've got to go with it, pretty soon, or you're going to miss the opportunity, one or both parents usually begin to waver. One other point, Anderson, you can sometimes get a parent who holds out to work with you, saying you pray, you do the ceremonies, healing ceremonies you want, we'll do the chemo, we can work together. That sometimes brings them around, too.

Cooper: Jeff, if they continue to refuse treatment and this boy dies, god forbid, would the parents be charged?

Toobin: They could be. Oftentimes the prosecutors exercise their discretion and say, look, they've lost a child. They've suffered enough. But the point is not to, you know, prosecute later. It's to save the kid now. That's the focus of everybody's effort. And what makes this case so excruciating is that you have a real cure here. 90-plus percent, and you have a 0% chance for the others. As art was saying, this one is a particularly easy case. Sometimes you have cases where there's only a 10% chance of saving the child. And the parents just want to take the kid home and, you know, do hospice care. That's an understandable situation under circumstances. This is not. This is, as far as I'm concerned, just child abuse.

Cooper: What's the legal precedent for something like this?

Toobin: There actually are a lot of precedents mostly involving Christian scientists, Jehovah's witnesses and virtually all the time the court says what this mother is doing while we sympathize with her pain, this is child abuse. This is the same thing –

Cooper: She could do it for herself, but it's the fact that she's making that decision for a minor.

Toobin: Absolutely. This is a minor. He is not qualified to make this decision for himself. This is what it needs to be a minor. Other people make your decisions for you, and you are not allowed to make this decision. This is the same thing as if he got hit by a car blocking the ambulance and letting him bleed to death. There is no difference. and if need be, they have to take the kid away and strap him down and put - and apply chemotherapy that way. It's horrible to think of, but it's life or death.

Cooper: In terms of what would the mom be charged with if, in fact, she is found?

Toobin: Child neglect, child abuse. It is a form of assault. It's just - you know, you are allowed to believe anything you want. And you are allowed to treat yourself in line with your own beliefs if you are an adult. But you can't impose religious beliefs on a child who has no other options.

CNN's Anderson Cooper asks Arthur Caplan and Jeffrey Toobin about the legal and ethical implications of the Daniel Hauser case.

Program Note: Tune in tonight to hear more from Jeffrey Toobin on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

When John G. Roberts, Jr., emerges from behind the red curtains and takes his place in the middle of the Supreme Court bench, he usually wears a pair of reading glasses, which he peers over to see the lawyers arguing before him. It’s an old-fashioned look for the Chief Justice of the United States, who is fifty-four, but, even with the glasses, there’s no mistaking that Roberts is the youngest person on the Court. (John Paul Stevens, the senior Associate Justice, who sits to Roberts’s right, is thirty-five years older.) Roberts’s face is unlined, his shoulders are broad and athletic, and only a few wisps of gray hair mark him as changed in any way from the judge who charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing, in 2005.

On April 29th, the last day of arguments for the Court’s current term, the Justices heard Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, a critical case about the future of the Voting Rights Act. Congress originally passed the law in 1965, and three years ago overwhelmingly passed its latest reauthorization, rejecting arguments that improvements in race relations had rendered the act unnecessary. Specifically, the bill, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006, kept in place Section 5 of the law, which says that certain jurisdictions, largely in the Old South, have to obtain the approval of the Justice Department before making any changes to their electoral rules, from the location of polling places to the boundaries of congressional districts. A small utility district in Texas challenged that part of the law, making the same argument that members of Congress had just discounted—that this process, known as preclearance, amounted to a form of discrimination against the citizens of the New South.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight to hear more from Jeffrey Toobin on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

When I was a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, in the early nineties, I did drug cases now and then, and I was always struck by the incredible disparity between sentences for crack and sentences for cocaine.

As we knew then - and as everyone knows now - crack was very much more associated with African-American users and suspects, and they got much higher sentences. Now, the Obama Administration is starting to move toward ending that disparity - but that move raises its own questions.

Will the Administration look "soft on crime"? Do they raise the sentences for coke, or cut them for crack? And is there room in our prisons for anyone else? We'll examine it and discuss on AC360° tonight.

Editor’s Note: See Jeffrey Toobin talk about the newest students' rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court tonight on AC360 at 10PM ET.

Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Senior Legal Analyst

The Supreme Court has struggled with the issue of students’ rights for years. In the 1960s, in the heyday of the liberal Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the justices more and more treated students the same way they treated everyone else – as individuals with rights. In one famous case from Des Moines in 1969, a student was thrown out of high school for wearing a black armband to oppose the Vietnam War, but the Court ruled that the student had the right to express himself in this way and ruled against the school.

But times have changed at the Supreme Court. Students have far fewer rights than it once appeared they did. In 1985, the Court ruled that a student caught smoking could have her purse searched.  Last year, in a crazy case out of Alaska, the Court ruled that a student could be suspended for holding a sign that said BONG HiTS 4 JESUS (even though Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion couldn’t say what those words meant).

Tonight we’re talking about another case in which students’ rights are in play.  In October 2003, school officials in a small town in Arizona got a tip that Savana Redding, who was 13-years-old at the time, was carrying prescription drugs to school and used them for non-medical reasons. School authorities first searched Savana’s backpack, then took her to the nurse’s office and conducted a strip search – and found no pills.

Her family sued the school district. Can a search like this one be illegal? Do students have any rights at all? We’ll discuss tonight.

Protesters in Boston on Wednesday complain that government is growing too large.

Editor's Note: See Jeffrey Toobin and David Gergen discuss the Tea Party protests tonight on AC360 at 10PM ET.

Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Senior Analyst

One of the great journalism projects of the next year will be untangling the forces at work in the anti-Obama movement.

Today we see it on display in the the Tea Party movement - which seems to me to embody an amorphous set of grievances that includes anti-bailout, too-high-taxes and too-much-regulation.

The resolution in Texas about honoring the Tenth Amendment, another part of this movement, has no legal effect, and it's actually a less-extreme version of the secession movement that has started to bubble up in Texas and elsewhere.

The real mystery for me is whether this is just ordinary political grumbling, which is perfectly appropriate, or the start of something worse - a quasi-militia movement that could become sinister and dangerous.

Anderson talks with CNN's Jeffrey Toobin about the Department of Justice vacating the conviction against former Senator Ted Stevens.