U.S. citizen Eric Volz remains in a hospital in Managua, Nicaragua, awaiting the end of a drawn-out saga that took an unexpected turn when a judge delayed his prison-release order.

Volz' scheduled release from jail Monday was inexplicably delayed when a judge in Rivas, in southwest Nicaragua, failed to sign-off on the release order, as required by law, according to a family spokeswoman.

Melissa Campbell, a representative of the Volz family, told The Nica Times in an e-mail that Volz has not yet been released from jail, despite the Granada appellate court's Dec. 14 ruling that overturned the murder verdict from last February, when the 28-year-old realtor and magazine publisher was found guilty of killing his Nicaraguan ex-girlfriend, Doris Ivania Jimenez, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

By a split vote of two to one, the Granada Appeals Court ruled in Volz' favor and ordered Rivas Judge Ivette Toruño, who ruled on the Volz case earlier this year, to issue his release. The appeals court also ruled to uphold the guilty verdict against Nicaraguan suspect Julio Martin Chamorro, a second murder suspect who stood trial and was found culpable along with Volz.

Toruño, who has declined Nica Times requests for comment since the February verdict, reportedly failed to issue the release order Monday afternoon, skipping out of the office at 1:30 p.m. before she was scheduled to meet with Volz's attorney and sign the papers, according to Campbell.

In the meantime, Volz remains in the Calderón Hospital in Managua, where he has been for the last month recovering for a series of gastrointestinal illnesses and asthma.

He is being “illegally detained,” according to Granada appellate judge Roberto Rodríguez, one of the three judges who ruled on the appeal and who discussed the case at length yesterday with The Nica Times.

Nicaragua's Top Government Attorney, Julio Centeno, expressed outrage yesterday at the verdict in the Volz appeal, and said that the case would be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Volz's mother, Maggie Anthony, meanwhile, went on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Monday night and the Today Show yesterday morning to plead her case and ask the Nicaraguan authorities to execute the Granada court order and let her son return home to Tennessee for Christmas, after nearly 10 months in prison here.

Read this Friday's print edition of The Nica Times, an eight-page publication of The Tico Times, for more on this story.