Nearly two weeks after the state’s highest court granted a new trial to Brandon Thongsavanh, the 21-year-old Lewiston man remains behind bars in an Arizona state prison.

Prison officials in Maine are still trying to decide how to get him here and where to put him when he arrives.

According to Denise Lord, an associate commissioner for the Maine Department of Corrections, Thongsavanh will either be returned to Maine by airplane or by car.

“We’re talking with the state of Arizona on how to best bring him back,” Lord said.

The decision of where to keep him until his next trial – a county jail or the Maine State Prison – will depend on how he will be classified now that he is no longer considered guilty of murdering Bates College student Morgan McDuffee.

Thongsavanh was convicted in July 2003 of murdering McDuffee during a street brawl on Main Street in Lewiston in March 2002.

He was sentenced to 58 years in prison. After a brief stay at the Maine State Prison, he was transferred to a maximum-security state prison in Arizona as part of a deal in which Maine agreed to exchange one of its prisoners for an Arizona inmate who was involved in a 15-day hostage standoff there.

The Arizona inmate, Steven Coy, was originally from Maine, and he demanded to be transferred here as part of the deal to set the hostages free.

Prison officials referred to the swap with Thongsavanh as a fair trade because both Coy and Thongsavanh were classified as high-risk inmates who required maximum security based on their behavior in prison.

At the time of the swap, Maine State Prison Warden Jeff Merrill declined to give specific reasons why Thongsavanh was chosen or why he required maximum security.

He would say only that most high-risk inmates have been involved in assaults, have threatened the staff or other prisoners, or are considered an escape risk.

Thongsavanh has been at the Arizona Prison Complex-Lewis in Buckeye for almost six months. A spokesman for the Arizona prison system said Thongsavanh has never been disciplined or written up during his time there.

“He’s done very well,” the spokesman said, explaining that interstate inmate transfers can help change an inmate’s attitude by placing him in a new environment and giving him an opportunity to start over.

Thongsavanh had been scheduled to remain in Arizona indefinitely. That changed on Oct. 7 when the Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued its ruling on Thongsavanh’s appeal.

The state’s top judges threw out his conviction based on their belief that jurors could have been prejudiced by the state prosecutor’s repeated reference to an inflammatory phrase on the T-shirt that witnesses said Thongsavanh was wearing on the night of the killing.

The phrase referred to Jesus as a four-letter derogatory term for vagina. The high court ruled that the phrase on the T-shirt had nothing to do with alleged crime and, therefore, was irrelevant and should never have been mentioned.

Thongsavanh’s second trial has not been scheduled. But his attorney, William Maselli, said he would like him to be returned to Maine as soon as possible so they can begin preparing.

Prison officials are now waiting for guidance from the court on whether Thongsavanh is once again classified as a pretrial prisoner, which means he would go back to a county jail to await his trial, or if he falls under some other category, which could allow them to send him back to the state prison.

If it is determined that he belongs in a county jail, the next decision would be which one he will be sent to. It could depend on where his second trial will be.

Defense attorney Maselli plans to request that the venue be changed from Androscoggin County, where the first trial was held, to a county where potential jurors may not be as familiar with the case.