But she was compelled to come back when Einhorn reportedly threatened to throw out her belongings he had with him on the street. So in September , Holly went back to the apartment in Philadelphia she had once shared with Einhorn to gather her things. But then, she disappeared. Einhorn was arrested, but just before his murder trial began in , he fled the country. Thus began a painstaking process of finding Einhorn and bringing him to trial.
In , the court convicted Einhorn in absentia, with an empty chair representing him at the trial. Interestingly, Einhorn managed to evade the law for 23 years before finally being extradited to the United States from France.
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September - Einhorn stands trial in Pennsylvania for the murder of Holly Maddux. Sentenced 17th October - Life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Her decomposing body was partially mummified and the remains weighed only 37 pounds. A post-mortem revealed that Maddux had suffered trauma to the head and her skull was smashed in several places as a result. However, the position of the body and size of the trunk meant that she had actually been alive and semi-conscious when placed in the trunk and had died trying to claw her way out.
He was charged with murder, as Pennsylvania has no degrees of murder. Einhorn was represented by the notorious defence attorney Arlen Specter. The bail hearing in itself was abnormal, as it was unheard of for bail to be granted in murder cases. Still vociferously protesting his innocence, Einhorn was released onto the streets. He told anyone and everyone that he would clear his name, claiming it was a conspiracy by the CIA or FBI, who wanted to discredit him and halt his political activities.
Then, on 21st January , Einhorn skipped bail on the eve of the pre-trial hearing and disappeared, probably to Europe. However, there were no extradition papers in effect and Einhorn fled Dublin after the alert. From there, he probably travelled throughout the United Kingdom, crossing the English Channel at some point, to enter continental Europe. In , the unprecedented step, in Philadelphia at least, was taken to try Einhorn in absentia, a hugely significant development that would later be exploited by Einhorn.
He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The address turned up one Annika Flodin, who disclaimed all knowledge of Einhorn, saying that she knew him as Ben Moore, and that she had no idea where he was. When Flodin subsequently disappeared, investigators ran her name through Interpol and found that she had relocated to France and married Einhorn, who was then known under the moniker of Eugene Mallon.
On 13th June , DiBenedetto and his men arrested Einhorn in a converted millhouse outside Champagne-Mouton, a beautiful village in the French countryside near Cognac. Einhorn enlisted the services of Ted Simon, an expert in international law and a brilliant attorney, to fight the extradition process. The rules deny the legitimacy of trials in absentia, especially when the maximum sentence is life imprisonment.
In French and European jurisprudence, trials in absentia deny the suspect the right to defend themself in a court of law and make a mockery of the presumption of innocence, the cornerstones of any just legal system. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.
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.
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. Wife: "I cannot say that I know if Ira killed or did not kill Holly" Visiting the Einhorns' countryside house some miles southeast of Paris in the rolling hills next to Cognac is like walking into the world of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, an American murderer who lives in bourgeois splendor just outside of Paris.
On one level, everything is normal. Annika Einhorn is a poised, pretty woman with long red hair, living alone with a black dog, Frieda, to whom she speaks in high pitched Swedish, running her house and caring for its grounds with quiet confidence.
Wherever you go with her in the minuscule village of Champagne Mouton, townsfolk inquire after Monsieur Einhorn and express outrage at his treatment, and in their partisanship you feel their attachment to Mrs. Einhorn as much as their concern with her husband. Like her husband's, her frame of reference covers the familiar ground of an ecologically conscious, politically aware, left-wing European intellectual, although in Annika's case there is also the therapeutic and Buddhist-inspired vocabulary of the consciousness movement.
But on another level, as in Highsmith's chilling world, there is something slightly sinister. The fact is that some 15 years ago this sensible, competent, charming woman stepped entirely out of the path of her life: abandoned not just her family and her past but her very identity to join Einhorn in a dangerous and difficult life underground, and she did this in the full knowledge that he was on the run from charges of murdering his girlfriend. Nothing visible in the house spoke of childhood or family, and an aura of rootlesness, of disconnection permeated the household.
One would expect, then, rather an impressionable person, one with, perhaps, the frailty so often ascribed to Holly Maddux. In fact, however, the picture is considerably harder to explain. Einhorn is no jail widow. Unwilling to risk possible arrest for aiding an American fugitive, and with Einhorn's lawyers unable to win a guarantee of immunity from prosecutor Joel Rosen, she has so far refused to testify in person at her husband's trial.
She has declined to sell the Moulin de Guitry -- her single asset -- in order to pay for Norris Gelman's services, leaving her husband to public defense lawyers. Her opinions about her husband are open-eyed, neutral, and well articulated.
She describes her years of marriage as a steady growth toward autonomy -- precisely, in an eerie way, the growth that Holly Maddux is depicted as achieving in the year before her death.
That makes it all the more shocking, the irony that on a certain level, Mrs. Einhorn is both responsible for her husband's capture -- it was the use of her real name in a French driver's license application that led to their discovery -- and, now, key to his defense. He's not even near this impression.
No physical violence, no physical abuse, all these things that he's consecutively presented with My feeling has always been that Ira is innocent. That has been a feeling and also a feeling that I've analyzed analytically by exposing him to questions so that I've also convinced myself intellectually.
Soon, in addition to her lawyers, she had enrolled a wide spectrum of the French human rights establishment: members of the French government and of the European Parliament; Socialist, Communist, and Green Party delegates; the League of Human Rights, the influential human rights group S. And as the extradition evolved from a legal to a political issue, so did the field of attack widen and the affaire Einhorn took on an increasingly political nature.
On Dec. In equal measure, throughout France, human rights advocates gave their support to Einhorn. Fodi Sylla, a founder of the enormously influential S.
Racisme, lamented the "climate of hysteria So already, how could we think of extraditing anyone in this context, in the middle of this hysteria? French supporters saw the question of Einhorn's guilt as a far lesser concern than the legal issues of his extradition. Again and again, lawyers and politicians bluntly described their lack of concern with Einhorn's guilt or the evidence against him, turning the question instead to the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans in U.
For many Americans, the French reaction was outrageous -- and given the overwhelming evidence of Einhorn's guilt, it was proof of both Einhorn's extraordinary powers of manipulation and of anti-Americanism in France.
But in a published statement, Abraham made her feelings clear. The possibility of innocence at war with the evidence of guilt 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 Jospin's desk, a purely political decision, not unlike a presidential pardon or commutation in America.
And as it did, the movement to stop Einhorn's 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 Einhorn's 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 , 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 , after over a year's delay and four years since Einhorn's 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 d'Etat and the European court of Human Rights.
I argued that in the constitutional system of the U. Wacquet shrugged and smiled. In mid-July , 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.
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, Holly's 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. 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.
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