Meet Ricky Lee Claycomb, age 37. He was serving a jail sentence in Colorado for robbery when Ohio authorities extradited him to Ohio to stand trial for a 1994 rape in which his DNA had turned up as a match. Mr. Claycomb went to trial in Ohio and was acquitted. The jury accepted his defense that he had had consensual sex with the accuser the day before the assault. Ohio jailers told him to leave. He told them he had to go back to finish serving his sentence in Colorado, and they told him to find his own way back.

So Mr. Claycomb called his mother in Colorado.

"He told them at the jail that he was supposed to be taken back to Colorado," said Mr. Claycomb's mother, Jill Claycomb. "He said they told him he was done in Canton and it was his problem to get back."

She sent him money for a bus ticket. After the two-day trip to Colorado, Mr. Claycomb visited her long enough to have oatmeal and peaches for breakfast and pizza for lunch, and then his brother drove him to the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City, Colo., late Thursday.