Comment Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon has won breathing space in his long-running fight against extradition, with news on Wednesday that judges have granted a further judicial review. This time it is to consider whether the Home Secretary was right to disregard medical evidence that he might harm himself or even commit suicide if extradited to the US.

McKinnon's lengthy battle looked to be entering the endgame when Home Secretary Alan Johnson rejected psychiatric advice on McKinnon's mental state in allowing extradition proceedings against the UFO conspiracy theorist to proceed back in November. The move restarted the clock on extradition proceedings, sparking fears from the 43-year-old's family that he might be hauled off to face US trial and likely imprisonment, possibly even before Christmas.

Johnson, while maintaining that he is powerless to intervene in extradition cases unless the death penalty might result from a conviction or other exceptional circumstances, has nonetheless maintained throughout that McKinnon was entitled to exhaust his legal options to appeal. That meant that McKinnon's case was once more passed onto the courts, with a hearing agreed for sometime in April or May and a ruling unlikely until late June, by which time a general election will have been held and Britain is likely to have a new (more sympathetic to McKinnon, at least) government.

The opposition Conservatives have publicly backed the McKinnon campaign, even going so far as to table a Parliamentary debate on the one-sided nature of the extradition treaty between the US and UK that the McKinnon case has served to highlight.

US authorities began extradition proceedings against McKinnon in 2005, three years after his initial arrest by UK detectives working for the former NHTCU over hacking attacks on Nasa and US military systems in the months before and after the 9/11 attacks. McKinnon has always admitted the attacks but has consistently denied causing any damage.

The years since have been accompanied by a prolonged, ongoing game of legal pass the parcel. Highlights of the campaign have included unsuccessful appeals to the High Court in 2007 and House of Lords in 2008, on the grounds that US authorities allegedly used strong-armed tactics during plea-bargaining negotiations and that McKinnon might receive a disproportionately long sentence under harsh conditions if extradited. The Lords turned down this appeal, but allowed the European Court of Human Rights to consider the case.

In August 2008, the European Court rejected arguments by McKinnon's lawyers that his human rights had been abused but by that time McKinnon was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism, establishing grounds for a further round of appeals.

Last July, McKinnon lost judicial reviews on the Home Secretary's decision not to block extradition, as well as a separate review of the Director of Public Prosecutions' decision not to bring charges against McKinnon in the UK.

McKinnon's supporters have long argued that he ought to be tried in the UK and the US authorities' decision not only to decline this option but to wait for an allegedly one-sided extradition treaty to come into effect before commencing proceedings lies at the heart of the case.

McKinnon is charged with hacking into 97 US military and NASA systems in an attack that allegedly crashed the network of the Naval Weapons Station Earle, New Jersey, for a week in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The US prosecution case claims that the hack interfered with the smooth running of the supply chain to the US Atlantic fleet normally provided by the base.

One US prosecutor claimed that McKinnon had carried out the "biggest military computer hack of all time" when he was originally arrested back in 2002. By contrast, McKinnon describes himself as a bumbling nerd who gained access to insecure systems while motivated by a desire to uncover suppressed evidence that the US military had supposedly harvested advanced alien technology from UFOs. He might have even seen a picture of a UFO at one time, but was too high to figure out how to record anything.