The murder trial of Ira Einhorn is about to commence in Philadelphia. It's too bad they didn't manage to drag this slime-bucket back home a few years earlier, before I moved out here to the 'burbs, because I would have loved to have a chance to sit on that jury. What, you say? It doesn't sound like I possess the requisite lack of predisposition to qualify as a juror? Heh, heh, guess not. But I'm a good liar.
Actually, that's a lie. I'm a lousy liar. And I wouldn't bet on the chances that I could sit quietly in a room with that man for more than a few minutes without provoking an incident. He has a reputation, you see, for exuding smug. And one of my fondest dreams for quite some years now has been the chance to watch the smug wiped quite thoroughly and permanently off his diabolical little pixie face. I have every confidence that this trial will accomplish that.
No, I have no personal connection to this case. I didn't even live in Philadelphia when Holly Maddux was murdered and I don't know any of her family or friends. I did at one point have a passing acquaintance with one of his lawyers (to have known Ira is, apparently, to possess a bottomless reservoir of anecdotes, opinions and off-color jokes about him) and I've tried to follow this story more closely ever since it jumped back into the news five years ago. But although it saturates the news in these parts, this is a story that may not be universally front-page, so here’s some very basic background.
Einhorn was a countercult guru in Philadelphia in the 70s. He was reputed to be brilliant, irreverant, incredibly charismatic, irresistible to women, on the cutting edge of technological, philosophical, political, paranormal and psychedelic trends. And he was also, probably not coincidentally, on the paranoid side. Specifically, he was heavily into a CIA psychic mind-control conspiracy thing, and so when the police found the body of Holly Maddux mummified in a trunk in his closet, her skull fractured in several places, he claimed that he was the victim of a frame-up. A big government conspiracy frame-up. Never mind that the neighbors had been complaining about the stench coming from his apartment for weeks (which he apparently didn't notice), never mind that the victim was one of his many former lovers, never mind that she had been missing for 18 months and that all of her personal belongings were stuffed into the same closet (in which he claimed to be keeping important secret documents). He didn't do it. He was framed. And so it was that, on the eve of his trial, he proceeded to enhance the image of his innocence by skipping bail and fleeing to Europe. It would be 16 long years before he was finally tracked down, living the good life in Bordeaux, France, with his wife. But what followed is even more astounding.
My hate affair with the French began in 1997 when, to my utter amazement, Ira Einhorn walked out of a French jail, a free man after the morally superior French government refused to extradite him to the U.S. Why? Well, because after searching fruitlessly for him for 12 years, the Philadelphia District Attorney had, in 1993, decided to bring some closure to the Maddux family by trying him in absentia and (surprise!) he was found guilty. The French didn’t like that. The French don’t believe in trials in absentia. France couldn’t possibly turn a presumably innocent man over to a barbaric regime that would subject him to incarceration without a fair trial just because he voluntarily forfeited his right to one by going on the lam. And at the time, Pennsylvania law didn’t allow for him to get a new trial. So (wielding its proverbial “big stickâ€), our justice system decided to accommodate the French and, in very short order, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law permitting Ira to receive a new trial with whatever evidence and testimony could still be dredged up 25 years after the murder. OK?
It didn’t end there, of course. He had to be re-arrested and then there were appeals and finally there was his dramatic "attempt" to slit his throat in front of reporters (what a mess), but now he’s here, getting ready for his finest moment, “The Ira Show†on Court TV. From what I can gather, his principal defense rests on the testimony of a few people who will say they saw the victim alive several months after the forensic experts have fixed the date of her murder. Should be interesting.
I’m not a big trial follower. I passed on OJ’s and I don’t even know if I get Court TV. The only thing I knew about my career ambitions when I started law school was that criminal law wasn’t one of them. And I should know better than to have made up my mind about a man’s guilt before he’s convicted. But here’s the thing. He was convicted. The fact that he wasn’t there doesn’t bother me a whole lot, because it was his choice. And then there’s the fact that he ran. This guy wasn’t exactly in a disadvantaged category vis a vis the justice system. He wasn’t poor and he wasn’t black and he wasn’t stupid. He had plenty of well paid legal talent at his disposal and they managed to get him bail, which was pretty amazing under the circumstances. I mean, it seems to me that a guy who claims he was framed in a huge international government conspiracy might be considered a bit of a flight risk. And finally, there’s that smug thing. I just have a real problem with people who play the system and love to flaunt the fact that they’re playing it, that everyone knows they’re playing it and that they know that everyone knows. Sounds like someone else we know.
Links to this story are almost superfluous. Plug “Ira Einhorn†into any search engine and you’ll come up with more hits than you need or want. Predictably, though, the Court TV website has lots of in-depth coverage of the history and the players. And you can always count on Salon.com for some dirt. It also bears mentioning that there are a few celebrity footnotes to the story. The lawyer that won Einhorn his bail release was a fellow by the name of Arlen Spector. Today, that would be Senator Arlen Spector, of the U.S. Congress. And District Attorney Lynne Abraham, who decided to try Einhorn in absentia in 1993, who finally succeeded in extraditing him in 2001 and who will preside over the prosecution of his upcoming trial was the judge who in 1979 signed the warrant for the original search of his apartment. Finally, in the tradition of another popular Philadelphia criminal, it appears that Einhorn has the support of various rock stars, movie stars and the like. Or does he? So far, none of them seem to have started a website for him or anything.
“You found what you found,†said Ira to the policemen who discovered Holly's body in his closet. Shortly, I expect he’ll be mouthing off in similar fashion to a jury of his peers who will find him G-U-I-L-T-Y.
