The legal odyssey of Louis Mickens-Thomas, though, goes back nearly a half-century.
At 82, he's spent more than half his life in prison for the 1964 rape and murder of a West Philadelphia girl, a 12-year-old who lived a few doors down from his shoe-repair shop.
Legal advocates believe he's innocent, the victim of a rogue forensic expert later unveiled as a ninth-grade dropout.
Their work led then-Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey to commute his life sentence in 1995, although Mickens-Thomas wasn't released for nine more years, by a U.S. appeals court that called the state parole board "vindictive."
Even then, his freedom proved short-lived.
Mickens-Thomas returned to prison 15 months later when he flunked out of a mandatory sex-offender program, and had his parole revoked.
His lawyers say he volunteered to a counselor that he had kissed a woman at church. Parole officials call the kiss menacing, and say other outbursts in the program show he remains a threat.
On Tuesday, the case returns to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court that accused the parole board of "defiance" and "bad faith" in the case in 2005.
"Sex offenders in Pennsylvania who say 'I'm innocent' are never paroled," said lawyer David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor involved in the case for years. "That's the Catch 22."
There are no sexual-offender programs for "non-admitters" at Graterford Prison, so Mickens-Thomas, who long ago earned a college degree from Villanova University in prison, has not been attending the program since his re-arrest. That's the grounds for not granting parole each year.
"There is nothing 'arbitrary' about requiring treatment," the parole board wrote in a recent court filing. "While on parole, ... he demonstrated that he remains a danger to the community."
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Thelma Tyler, 87, remembers the day the little girl next door disappeared. Edith Cooper's father would blow a whistle to call his children home. That Sunday in September, he blew and blew, to the point that Tyler's husband grew annoyed.
"She'd hear that whistle, she would come, but she didn't," Tyler recalled Friday. "They sent her to the Laundromat that morning, but she never came back."
The body was found Tuesday in an alley behind the block, apparently dumped there after the trash trucks came through. The city's forensic expert, Agnes Mallatratt, eventually linked dog hairs, fibers, shoe wax and other trace evidence at the scene to Thomas, who lived and worked three doors down.
A jury convicted Mickens-Thomas in 1966, but he won a new trial when Mallatratt's sham credentials were unveiled in an unrelated trial. The outcome was no better in 1969. Mallatratt was kept off the stand, but her boss vouched for her tests, saying he had supervised them.
"That can really be open to question, allowing him to testify about her work," said James C. McCloskey, executive director of Centurion Ministries, which has helped free 44 exonerated people from death row or life terms, many through DNA.
The DNA from Edith Connor's underwear might have offered definitive proof of Mickens-Thomas' guilt or innocence. If only the garment hadn't been thrown out in 1991.
Instead, advocates raised the scientific errors as they successfully fought for his commutation and release.
"You know, we took his name off the board, because he was a free man. He was doing very well on the outside," said McCloskey, whose group has exonerated inmates ceremoniously remove their names from an active-cases board at their Princeton, N.J., office.
Mickens-Thomas was finally released in April 2004. The parole board denied his request to live with a nephew, a corrections officer, because there were children in the gated Poconos community. So, after 40 years in prison, he went to live alone in an Allentown apartment.
"He was just doing odd jobs around town, until his world caved in on him again," McCloskey said.
He believes there is still exculpatory evidence to pursue.
Mallatratt's boss had testified about Type O blood found at the scene, while the victim and Mickens-Thomas were Type B. And Mickens-Thomas was hardly busy hiding a body after the crime, as he went out for dinner with friends Sunday and had a girlfriend at his house on Monday, McCloskey said.
But any innocence claims are on the back burner at this point, as he, Rudovsky, Widener University law professor Leonard Sosnov and others focus on the matter at hand - the five years their client has served for a technical parole violation.
"It's a very unfair, unjust, cruel, barbaric treatment that he's received at the hands of the parole board," McCloskey said Friday by phone from Georgia, where he's investigating another case.
"Lou's now 81. His mind is really starting to fail him, he looks gaunt," he said. "When he got out, he looked really hearty. He's no longer that. He's beaten down."
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The parole board insists Mickens-Thomas has shown a lifelong anger toward women.
As a teenager in 1945, he was charged with rape. In 1959, he was charged with choking a pregnant woman into unconsciousness with a scarf. He was also accused that year of attacking a 14-year-old girl.
The rape charge was reduced, and he was not convicted of the others.
"Your anger and resentment toward women was evident in your recent interview," the parole board said in 2003.
And parole officials are not alone in their concerns about his behavior during his 2004-2005 stint in Allentown.
Sr. U.S. District Judge Ronald Buckwalter saw the church kiss as a red flat. Depending on whom you believe, it was either no big deal or a stealth assault.
And Mickens-Thomas had allegedly intimidated a treatment counselor and threatened two others in his group. Rudovsky believes his client was by then frustrated by the program, and blowing off steam.
"Initially, it seemed to me that this was much adieu about one adult kissing another," Buckwalter wrote in his 2006 order. But he called the re-arrest neither vindictive nor retaliatory, and upheld it.
Either way, Mickens-Thomas remains the only person in Pennsylvania history to remain in prison after a governor commuted his life sentence, according to his attorneys.
"This is part of a revulsion against sex offenders," Rudovsky said, pointing to registration requirements and other new laws adopted in the last decade. "You can agree or disagree, but ... as a political-legal matter, that's what's happened."
Tyler once sent Edith Connor to Mickens-Thomas' shop to pick up her shoes. It was not the day the girl disappeared, she said. A brother still lives next-door in the family home, while the girl's mother died just a few years ago.
"She was grieving a long time about it," Tyler said. "She would tell me about it. She said she would never sign for the guy to come out."
