According to reports, a Polish court denied a US plea to extradite famed filmmaker Roman Polanski for a child s-x crime conviction on Friday.

As a dual citizen of France and Poland, he has spent much of his time in the intervening years in France, which does not extradite its own citizens.

After a 2009 trip to Switzerland, he was placed under house arrest for nine months until an American warrant was rejected and he was freed. He has lately been working on a film in Poland, where he was born and survived the Holocaust.

Polanski told reporters in Krakow, where the case was heard, “I can breathe now with relief. I pleaded guilty. I went to prison. I have done my penalty. The case is closed.”

The judge in the Polish case, Dariusz Mazur, said the situation was convoluted, but that extradition would violate the old Polanski’s human rights since he may be sentenced to incarceration.

“I find no rational answer to the question: what is the real point of the U.S. extradition request?” said Mazur, who spent more than two hours explaining his reasoning to the court in Krakow.

He also stated that the punishment for extradition on a 40-year-old case had lost its prospective punitive nature. Polanski was not in court for the decision.

Polanski told reporters, “I’m glad I trusted Poland’s justice system. Listening to the court today I was really moved because I had not imagined the judge would know the case in such detail, with all the dates quoted correctly. There was not one mistake.”

The decision might bring an end to a decades-long extradition dispute surrounding the 1977 crime, but prosecutors may still file an appeal.

Polanski was initially charged with six felonies, including rape by use of narcotics, but was permitted to plead guilty to one count of illegal s-xual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl at a Los Angeles photo session in 1977.

In exchange, the judge decided to dismiss the other counts and sentence him to a 90-day mental assessment. An examiner determined Polanski was mentally healthy and unlikely to offend again after 42 days.

The California court then announced that he would return Polanski to prison for the remaining 90 days, following which he would urge him to commit to a “voluntary deportation.” Polanski departed the United States on February 1, 1978, the day before he was to be sentenced to the extra imprisonment.

Polanski’s extradition has long been sought by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, which stated in an emailed statement that its “position remains the same” following the judgment. It declined to provide any other information.