It was the in-absentia conviction won by Lynne Abraham in 1993 that, ironically, protected Einhorn under French Law. Gelman quickly realized that France would not return Einhorn; the French, like all European governments except Spain, require an in-absentia conviction to be retried when the prisoner is captured, whereas Pennsylvania law allowed Einhorn to be sentenced, in absentia, to life without recourse to a new trial.

An in-absentia trial is the "mark of the totalitarian government," Gelman says. "To my mind it was a blatant crushing of all of his rights. Everything rang hollow. The defendant is presumed innocent. Well, of course, the defendant isn't there, he ran away. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt? Well, proof is, he ran away. It eviscerated the right to a fair and impartial trial." Working with Gelman and Theodore Simon, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer with significant foreign experience, Annika Einhorn retained two French lawyers: Dominique Tricaud, a Parisian, with Dominique Delthil acting as local counsel in Bordeaux, where Einhorn had by now been jailed some 100 miles from his house in Champagne Mouton.

The two Dominiques, as they came to be known, had other roles that qualified them for the case. Tricaud is Paris head of Helsinki Watch, the international human rights organization. And Delthil heads the Bordeaux office of the influential organization founded in 1898 at the time of the Dreyfus trial, the League of Human Rights.

In six months' time, Pennsylvanians witnessed the unbelievable sight of Ira Einhorn leaving prison in Bordeaux into the arms of his waiting wife, his extradition from France having been refused on the grounds that Pennsylvania's in-absentia conviction, with no chance of a new trial, violated French law requiring a new trial after the capture of the prisoner.

Just six days later, a new law passed in Pennsylvania. Under the law, any American fugitive caught in a country where extradition is denied on account of a previous in-absentia conviction may, when returned to the United States, be guaranteed a new trial. And this law was going, it seemed, to be applied retroactively to Einhorn. The Einhorn Law, like the in-absentia trial, had an unintended consequence in France. What had been, until then, a question of criminal law, became a human rights cause.

On the way from the Champs Elysies to Xavier de Roux's offices in the enormous international firm Conseil Generale de Charente-Maritime, just next to the Seine on the Right Bank, you pass a huge statue of Charles de Gaulle, inscribed with the quote:

"There is a pact, twenty centuries old, between the greatness of France and the liberty of the world."

It's an astonishing statement to read, here, right next to the Avenues FDR and General Eisenhower, a couple of the Americans without whom Paris might well be a provincial capital of Greater Nazi Germany today. It speaks volumes about the French, not all of it good. One thing it fairly reflects, however, is the pride the French take at their jurisprudence -- easily as much as they do in their wine.

Xavier de Roux is a deeply conservative politician who has served both as mayor of his provincial town and as a member in the French Parliament, a lawyer of enormous power. De Roux is a white-haired man, perhaps 60, with the attitude of nearly self-effacing politeness that, in France, signifies great authority. He sits at his ease in a corner office over the Seine, some of the most valuable office space in the world, describing why he lent his support to a left-wing community gathering around Einhorn. "As a lawyer, I believe in the presumption of innocence," he explains. "And not only in a theoretical way, because, after having spoken to Einhorn ... the horrible crime of which he's accused does not seem to coincide with his personality. I say this so strongly because I have real difficulty -- I tell you this quite frankly -- in imagining Monseiur Einhorn in the skin of a murderer. Anything can happen. I don't pretend to know the truth. But a priori -- and here we are in the presumption of innocence -- I believe him to be innocent."

Pennsylvania's Einhorn Law, as it came to be known, raised new questions for de Roux. "[It] was clearly made not for a general case," he explains, "but clearly in order to obtain the extradition of Ira Einhorn. For any jurist in a legally constituted country, to pass a law for a specific interest and a specific case is not, let's face it, a very good way to pass laws. And so there were quite a few French lawyers who said, 'Well, what's going on here?'"

It was a question that particularly bothered Dominique Delthil, whose Bordeaux office wall displays a photograph of Einhorn recoiling in fright while Delthil, nearly animal with rage, defends him from the approach of an American journalist. Now, he speaks with high indignation. "To insist, at any price, on creating a special law, when the law by its principals must be general! In legal terms, it is absolutely scandalous! I understand how the family feels, but when the state lets itself be manipulated in this way by private interest to create such scandalous laws, it shocked me. I still can't get over it. I never would have thought that this could have existed in a democratic country."

When, therefore, the Bordeaux court met again in February of 1998 to consider the extradition anew in the light of the Einhorn Law, there were no great worries in the Einhorn camp. As Ted Simon advised them from Philadelphia, the law was transparently unconstitutional, and could likely be overturned in the state Supreme Court, thereby voiding the terms of the extradition agreement. Nor was Simon alone in his views.

"In this country there are three branches in our government: There's the legislative, the judicial and the executive. Now, the legislative branch has absolutely no power, under any circumstances, to pass a law that says any defendant is entitled to a new trial." F. Emmett Fitzpatrick, a former Philadelphia district attorney, patiently describes the principle of separation of powers, all the while giving the distinct impression that patience is not his strong suit. "Whether a defendant is entitled to a new trial or not depends solely on the judicial branch ... Now what happened here was, apparently the prosecution went to the Legislature and said, 'We want a law enacted that says if we try someone in absentia, for reasons that they never really set forth, that that person can ask for a new trial.' And so there was legislation passed that said that." (Last winter, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court declined to hear the issue of the Einhorn Law. While pretrial motions by Einhorn's public defense lawyers, filed this month, called for the trial to be halted on the grounds of the Einhorn Law's unconstitutionality, it is still far from certain who may have standing to bring this issue back to the Supreme Court.)

But whereas the Bordeaux court had been clearly willing to allow Einhorn to go free based on the in-absentia conviction, now it hesitated. To judge the constitutionality of an American law in France seemed an entirely different matter, one to be made, in France, by the executive branch, not the judicial. Unwilling, ultimately, to question internal American constitutional issues, the Bordeaux judges lifted their ban on the extradition, allowing it to enter the appeals process.

It was now that Annika Einhorn got to work.

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