One of those oddball synchronicities came together this early autumn, as the arrest of director Roman Polanski for his long-evaded pedophilia penalty coincided by days with the death of a Manson-family killer, who's list of victims in a legendary murder spree 40 years ago included Polanski's then-wife, Sharon Tate.

Susan Atkins, remembered as one of the most enthused and spooky of Charles Manson's cultish thrill-killers, was 61 and suffered from brain cancer. And she died behind bars, deep in the brutal guts of the California prison system, where she'd wasted away the last four decades of her life.

...The man who prosecuted her for first-degree murder said Friday that one of his lasting images was that of a "heartless, bloodthirsty robot." Vincent Bugliosi, however, said that image has become more ambiguous with the passage of time. [Source: Los Angeles Times]

Her death brought up a panoply of names from the filmy past - Manson, "Tex" Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Bobby Beausoleil - all still serving time for those dark crimes committed so long ago, in the twilight of the '60s. In fact, no one convicted for their roles in the two nights of almost ritualistic bloodshed called the "Tate-La Bianca murders" has ever been released from prison. 

They've been "inside" much longer than most domestic monsters. In Florida, which rivals Texas for the death penalties meted out for first-degree murder, an inmate fortunate enough to avoid walking his last mile to the injection theater serves an average of 19-21 years in the slammer. By those lights, the Manson family should have been out in time to toast the end of the Reagan era.

One big difference is the rigorous activities of Tate's mother and sister, who have attended every parole hearing for every member of Manson's bloody band, and have made sure the State of California remembers just how blood-stained are their hands.

So it was a little jarring to hear Debra Tate popped up on the Today Show this week, defending her one-time brother-in-law, now facing extradition to the U.S. from Switzerland for assaulting an underage girl in 1977:

"There's rape and then there's rape," (Tate) said. "It was determined that Roman did not forcibly have sex with this woman. It was a consensual matter." Leaving aside the principle that under California law, a 13 year-old girl is legally incapable of consenting to sex, Tate said that discussions with Los Angeles prosecutors led her to believe Polanski would not get a fair trial there. "I do believe that our system is extremely broken on [multiple] levels," she said.  

That "rape and 'rape'" distinction - like pornography, something we all recognize but can't adequately define - got Whoopi Goldberg in hot water, when her feminist ideals seemingly clashed with her... what?... professional loyalities, and led her to defend the fugitive filmmaker by accurately noting his guilty plea was not for "'rape' rape." Seeing the video from "The View", it's easy to see in her eyes that she realized she'd stepped in a deep pile of repulsion as the words left her mouth. Rarely have terms for rape been drawn so exactingly, this side of the Boston Strangler's legal team.

Right-wing pundits accuse Goldberg and other Hollywood celebrities of evincing elite prerogative in their defense of Polanski. Heavyweight (literally and figuratively) producer Harvey Weinstein, who's circulating a petition to free the director, refers to the charge in an Independent op-ed as a "so-called crime". Sympathetic media tends to paint the controversy in terms of progressive, bright creative types battling inbred, bible-thumping morality of backward snake-handlers.

On which side would you want to be?

There are strange cross-currents here to that iconic celebrity-crime sensation, the O.J. Simpson case, in that progressives, and oddly feminists, seem to set aside their own issues for the sake of combating some overarching injustice that only can be perceived faintly by the rest of us. In Simpson's case, in work like In Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, credentialed leftist writers and activists like co-editor Toni Morrison, Claudia Brodsky Lacour and others go out of their way to defend a man who was at very least a wife-beater, on the pretext that Simpson - via his Bronco hejira and agonizing trial - fits their template of put-upon African-American victim.

Like Simpson, Polanski's case seems to pivot not on the crime he's accused of, but of who he is. Of course, the reverse of that, accusing someone not for what they did but for who they are, is the essense of bigotry.

Based on his life story and his resume of truly monumental films, Polanski's defenders seem willing to excuse a crime by which normally they'd be... well... repulsed. I don't think its really violation of anachronistic, provincial morality that angers their opponents. It's the obvious flaunting of a hypocritical double-standard that so inflames them.

Here's the nut of any such double-standard: Its downside ensnares far more people than those surfing the 'upside'. No one knew that better than Susan Atkins. Can anyone doubt she would have been freed long ago, had her victims been Hollywood Boulevard street hustlers, or fellow hippies? That she and her cohorts came into the Hills, into the haunts of the rich and powerful for their prey, doomed her to life in prison. Tate's survivors have help in the parole hearings, and it's this message: There are certain people, in this society, not to be killed. Not to be victims. And, so, not to be perpetrators. 

There is a recent, superior documentary on Polanski's case, called "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" that I caught last year on HBO; from it, I took away a deep sense of ambiguity about his story. Although I have no evidence for it, I think the film's makers originally intended it as an apologia for Polanski, as a plea of forgiveness for what Weinstein termed a trivial, "so-called crime". That's before they encountered and interviewed Polanski's victim - the woman now and the frightened 13-year-old she was three decades ago.

The film covers, extensively, her grand jury testimony, in which she testifies she resisted his advances and asked him to call her mother before he drugged, raped and sodomized her. In 1978, the L.A. prosecutors allowed him to plead to lesser charges to spare her what likely would be a torturous cross-examination. Did you know that? Balancing that are the screwy legal irregularities of the case, and a judge every bit as L.A. eccentric as Zsa Zsa Gabor. But while it's obvious the system treated Polanski unfairly - by making a deal for him to plead guilty and reneging with a sentence likely to entail prison time - does that mitigate the heinousness of his crime?

At one point in his op-ed, referring to the tragedies Polanski faced in World War II, Weinstein clumsily asks, "How do you go from the Holocaust to the Manson family with any sort of dignity?" Well... Mr. Weinstein... I've met people who faced vast tragedy and kept their dignity, because dignity can't be taken away by anything or anyone outside ourselves, no matter how debasing the treatment we face. Like each of us, high and low, rich and not, only Polanski can shed his own dignity, and it's evident, one dark night long ago, he did just that.