By Linda Deutsch

LOS ANGELES (AP) — John Mark Karr "marches to the beat of a different drummer" and is anxious to travel to Colorado to face the allegations against him in the slaying of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, an attorney says.

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But the timing of his trip is up to authorities, who have been tightlipped about when he'll be transferred.

Karr agreed Tuesday to go to Colorado without a fight about extradition. In a two-minute court appearance he was impassive and his expression changed only once when he slowly closed his eyes as the judge recited the count of first-degree murder that Boulder, Colo. prosecutors included in an arrest warrant.

The comments about Karr's personality and mental state came from attorney Jamie Harmon, who attended Tuesday's hearing and whose partner, Patience Van Zandt, represented Karr when he was charged in 2001 with possessing child pornography in Northern California.

"He wants to go now," said Harmon. "Mr. Karr has been portrayed by the media as of late as being mentally unstable, attention-seeking, unwell, mentally unwell. And he is none of those things. He is anxious to have an opportunity to address the allegations against him, to be portrayed in a more accurate and complete way."

The attorney, who said she and Van Zandt, would be advising Karr in some capacity, said Karr was "not subject to ready categorization or easy answers."

"You've heard the expression, `He marches to the beat of a different drummer?' John Karr marches to the beat of a different drummer," Harmon said.

She described him as intelligent and unusual.

"He is a different sort of person than most of us walking around on the face of the planet, and that differentness has been construed in the media as wrong or somehow unbalanced," she said. "And I don't find that to be true at all. I found him to be very engaging, very bright, very articulate and very, very much appropriate in his emotional response to what is going on."

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