ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 18, 1997 TAG: 9703180059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
Joseph O'Dell has spent 11 years on Virginia's death row for the 1985 rape and murder of a 44-year-old Virginia Beach woman.
The European Parliament on Monday called on the U.S. court system to reassess what it believes is evidence of innocence in the case of convicted Virginia Beach murderer Joseph Roger O'Dell III.
The plea came one day before arguments in the case are scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court will consider a constitutional point today. Lower courts have rejected O'Dell's innocence claims.
"We think Joseph O'Dell is innocent, and that there is no connection between the crime and the person of Joseph O'Dell," said Luciano Nero, one of four Italian officials who spoke on behalf of the European Parliament at a news conference organized by O'Dell's girlfriend, Lori Urs.
Nero also is president of Italy's "Campaign for Joseph O'Dell." The case has received widespread publicity and drawn protests throughout Italy, whose population adamantly opposes the death penalty.
"It is not true what many of you think - that the Italians have looked at this in a superficial manner," Nero told television crews and reporters.
"We know the issue, we think, better than it is known in the U.S. People are surprised at the clamor in Italy. We are surprised at our end about the silence in the U.S."
O'Dell, 55, has spent 11 years on Virginia's death row for the 1985 rape and murder of Helen Schartner, a 44-year-old Virginia Beach woman. Acting as his own lawyer, he was convicted based on blood, tire track and circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a woman who had survived a similar attack by him 10 years earlier in Florida. A jailhouse snitch, who said O'Dell had confessed to him, also testified. The snitch, Steven Watson, has since recanted. O'Dell maintained that the blood on his clothing was the result of a bar fight.
In 1989, O'Dell found a philanthropist to pay for DNA analysis of two bloodstains on his clothing. Blood from one stain did not match O'Dell or Schartner. Test results from the second stain, originally regarded as a match with Schartner's blood, are now in dispute because the testing method has been discarded as unreliable.
With the Watson recantation, O'Dell's lawyers say there is no reliable evidence against him.
"I'm convinced that there is substantially no evidence that anyone can point to that substantially links O'Dell to this crime," said Clive A. Stafford Smith, a Louisiana lawyer who once represented O'Dell on appeal and who participated in Monday's news conference.
``But the real issue here is: How convinced do we have to be before we kill someone?''
The three federal courts which have reviewed the evidence were not convinced to save him.
"The only thing that O'Dell has demonstrated is that one of the many bloodstains on his clothing did not come from either himself or Helen Schartner," wrote 4th Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig in an opinion released in September.
DNA will not be an issue when the case is argued in the Supreme Court today. Instead, the justices will consider whether one of their previous rulings - in the case of Simmons vs. North Carolina - should apply to O'Dell.
In that case, the justices ruled that juries in capital cases should be told if the defendant is ineligible for parole. The court is expected to decide by May if the 1994 ruling is retroactive and therefore applicable to O'Dell's case. If the decision is yes, O'Dell will get a new trial. If no, he will be executed.
O'Dell's European supporters maintain it is absurd that the U.S. court system is more concerned about the Simmons rule than about O'Dell's innocence claim.
According to Nero, the Vatican is preparing a formal declaration opposing the death penalty. Also, he said, 50 members of the European Parliament have signed a resolution asking the United Nations to ban it in member countries.
``The law of man is more advanced than natural law,'' Franco Danieli, a member of Italy's Commission on Foreign Affairs, said Monday. ``Therefore, you cannot respond to murder with another murder. Law must correct human nature, not copy it.''
Nero, Danieli, Sen. Mario Occhipinti and Calogero Piscitello - a member of a European human rights commission - have arranged to visit O'Dell at the Mecklenberg Correctional Center in Boydton on Wednesday
``The overture [to arrange the visit] was made by O'Dell's attorneys, who are vouching for them,'' Department of Corrections spokesman David Botkins said. ``That, coupled with an extensive search, the fact that it will be a non-contact visit and the fact that they are international dignitaries, made us feel like we could grant this brief, non-contact visit.''
For what he calls ``security reasons,'' DOC Director Ron Angelone has not allowed reporters to see inmates in any Virginia prisons since 1995.
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