It’s been a depressing task for quite some time to write about these stories, but yet another one has come across the wire this morning. The United States made yet another attempt to bring convicted child rapist and pedophile Roman Polanski to justice via extradition, this time from Poland. But a judge in a Polish court has flatly refused to comply, offering little to no reason as to why. (NBC News)

A Polish court on Friday rejected a U.S. request to extradite acclaimed filmmaker Roman Polanski over a child sex-crime conviction, according to reports.

Judge Dariusz Mazur told Krakow’s district court that the extradition request was “inadmissible,” according to Reuters.

The ruling could close the latest chapter in a decades-long extradition saga around the 1977 crime — though prosecutors could still appeal, Reuters reported.

Polanski has dual Polish and French citizenship and travels freely back and forth between the two nations, as well as attending posh parties around the rest of the continent. The French don’t extradite any of their citizens to us, no matter what crimes they have committed, and now it seems that the Polish are going to hold to the same line.

This should be an embarrassment to all of Europe by this point but nothing seems to budge them from their position. Polanski is a monster, plain and simple. No amount of high profile film awards will alter the fact that he drugged, raped and sodomized a 13 year old child in 1977. He plead guilty to the atrocity but then fled the country when it looked like he wouldn’t get a favorable plea deal approved by the judge. We’ll likely never know how many other children he may have abused in the intervening years, though some of our Hollywood elite still somehow find reasons to defend him.

These countries are supposedly some of our closest allies, aren’t they? And they depend on our continued help and support in the face of aggressive neighbors. (See: Russia.) It seems to me that a competent administration could leverage those sorts of relationships and obtain some cooperation in getting this guy in handcuffs before he expires of old age in a plush villa somewhere. Mind you, I’m not laying this entirely at the feet of the Obama administration. This problem stretches back to the days of Carter and Reagan and nobody has solved it to date. But Obama is who we have now and if he wanted to show how serious he is about law enforcement and protecting American citizens, this seems like the sort of case which would generate a ton of positive headlines for him at very little cost on the international diplomacy front.

But instead, we run the same old story for the umpteenth time. Polanski will remain on the loose, living the good life in Europe while he thumbs his nose at the United States.