To look on the bright side of an outrage, we now have a new definition of chutzpah. It used to be: the guy who killed his parents then asked the court to have mercy on an orphan.

Now, it's Ira Einhorn. Here is a man who killed his lover, Holly Maddux, stuffed her in a trunk, skipped bail and fled the country before trial. Yet he's managed to dodge extradition from France -- for now and perhaps forever -- by whining how unfair it was to try him in absentia.

It makes you want to scream: Donnez-moi une break.

Bad as yesterday's miscarriage of justice in a French court was, the smug gloating of Einhorn's French attorney was almost worse.

"The United States has learned today to its distress that it still has lessons to learn from old Europe in matters of human rights," said Dominique Delthil. Ah, yes, M. Delthil, the land of the guillotine, l'affaire Dreyfus and the Vichy collaborators has so much to teach the land of the Constitution.

To be sure, our legal system is marred by failings and outrages -- of which we are grimly aware. But the Einhorn case was not one.

Einhorn's pitch to the French court was plagued by illogic, but buoyed by appeals to Gallic envy. To listen to his lawyers, the question wasn't: Should a killer face justice? It was: Wouldn't it be fun to poke American power in the eye?

In a maneuver Joseph Heller would savor, this fugitive killer's lawyers insisted he deserved a retrial, then claimed it would be barbaric to expose him to a legal system that allows the death penalty.

Sorry, no sale -- even for those of us who agree the death penalty is wrong. Einhorn already has been sentenced to life in prison. The only way he might risk capital punishment would be a retrial.

To casual onlookers, this ruling has the feel of bitter farce. But for Ms. Maddux's family and friends, it is a cruel wound. For their sake, any possible legal avenues to bring this killer to justice must be pursued.