Notwithstanding the support for Einhorn, successive appeals courts in France were declining to stop the extradition, and as they did, the decision wound its way closer and closer to Prime Minister Jospins desk, a purely political decision, not unlike a presidential pardon or commutation in America. And as it did, the movement to stop Einhorns extradition steadily gained political momentum. The enormously popular and influential Jack Lang -- at the time chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the National Assembly, wrote to Jospin that because the Einhorn Law "could fail to be applied by American judges who thought it unconstitutional... Einhorns in absentia conviction could stand, which would be in total contradiction of the fundamental principles of French law, as well as with the European Convention of Human Rights."

In May 2000, a petition was delivered to Jospin calling for him to block the extradition of Ira Einhorn. Among the 94 prominent signatories were 14 European deputies and 19 members of the Regional Counsel, as well as several French cabinet ministers.

In the end, in the midsummer of 2001, after over a years delay and four years since Einhorns original arrest in France, Jospin signed the extradition order. According to Noel Mamhre, a former presidential candidate for the French Green Party, Jospin resisted enormous pressure but finally gave in after President Bill Clinton personally intervened.

Claire Wacquet, a powerful lawyer whose youth and casual language belie her extremely high status -- she appears before the final appeals courts in France, and her office sits just down the Seine from the Assemblie Nationale -- argued the final appeal before the Conseil dEtat and the European court of Human Rights. "I explained that this law giving a new trial in reality was not constitutionally sound, either in Pennsylvania or in the U.S.A.... I argued that in the constitutional system of the U.S.A., this famous law called the Einhorn Law could very well fail to be applied."

Wacquet shrugged and smiled. "And the Conseil dEtat said to me, Well, we dont care and we dont want to hear about it."

"What happened here was France just caved in," Emmett Fitzpatrick says with blunt disdain. "They said, 'Okay, fine, thats alright, if youre going to give him a new trial, well send him back.' That happens all the time, that people will cave in, although theyre for these general principles that they fight so hard to maintain."

In mid-July 2001, Einhorn provided reporters with a dramatic illustration of what he thought Jospin had done to him: He slit his throat with a kitchen knife, leaving the scars that I recognized when I met him in Pennsylvania jail. On July 19th, neck swaddled with bandages, Ira Einhorn returned to America for the first time in 23 years, escorted by U.S. marshals.

"It was good to see Ira finally show terror," said an editorial headline in the Philadelphia Daily News under a "For Holly" logo. "After 20 years Einhorns Back, ran an earlier headline. "And the Worlds a Better Place."

Ira Einhorn's universe is now a simple, clean construction with high windows and the peaceful air of a smoothly running workplace. The prison guards are polite and respectful and a pleasant, clean visiting room is available. During visiting hours a prisoner is always on duty to take Polaroids of inmates with their families standing in front of a screen with a couple of choices of bucolic countryside backdrops.

Einhorn drinks Dr. Peppers and eats the healthiest sandwiches available from the vending machines while talking virtually without a pause. Watching him eat -- my appetite disappears the moment I enter the prison, and a heavy sense of oppression lies over me until I've put it well behind me on the highway back home -- I try to reconcile the image of Holly Maddux's death by battering with the eloquent idealist in front of me.

Only the blue eyes, with their peculiar intensity, bridge the gap. Watching them, again and again, I have to remind myself that the man before me is presumed innocent by law, and that, despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, no one but he -- and, if he is innocent, Hollys actual murderer -- knows the truth.

It's not easy, sitting in Houtzdale before a man who may once have stood face to face, as forensic evidence showed that the murderer did, with Holly Maddux and beat her with enough force to fracture her skull in six places. It's not easy at all, and I soon came to dread my visits to Houtzdale, which seemed punishments in their own right.

Certainly, for the Philadelphia D.A.'s office, for the Maddux family, and for the enormous preponderance of Philadelphians who have for decades been outraged by Einhorn's flight, anything other than a conviction, next month, will be an outrageous miscarriage of justice.

But for Ira Einhorn and those who have lent their support to him, a perfect continuity unites his first incarnation as Philadelphia's entry into the countercultural pantheon with his life as a human rights hero in France.

Certainly the strange legal corner into which the Ira Einhorn case has strayed seems to have no fair way out: On one hand, the guilty may go free; on the other, the Constitution may be abused. It's a terrifying thing to witness, when the legal system offers only two injustices as a response to a tragic murder.

But does anyone remember what Gideon and Miranda, who lent their names to crucial legal protections, were actually accused of? It's possible that the future will remember the constitutional implications of Ira Einhorn's case more than the crime, which in itself is a terrible kind of injustice.

One afternoon in Philadelphia I asked Gelman: What of Holly Maddux's family -- neither powerful, nor rich, nor on the cutting edge of an intellectual tradition, just Americans, the people whom the Constitution is there to protect? Gelman paused before the question, clearly a key one for any criminal lawyer, and answered: "[T]he Constitution does not say that everybody who commits a crime will go to jail. It doesn't say that. The Constitution does say that if you're accused of a crime, you're entitled to a lawyer and jury, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, presumption of innocence. That's the way the Constitution is written.

"As you would expect," he added, as if an afterthought, "having been written by revolutionaries who were accused by the Crown of various and sundry offenses."

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