DATE: Thursday, March 20, 1997              TAG: 9703210939

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B12  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: From The Associated Press.

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

VIRGINIA DIGEST

State to investigate

if mental patients'

rights are violated

ABINGDON - The state mental health board agreed Wednesday to appoint an independent commission to investigate whether patient rights are being violated in state mental hospitals.

James G. Lumpkin Jr., the board's chairman, said the review was prompted by the deaths of two patients at Central State Hospital and complaints from private mental health groups about patient mistreatment.

The Justice Department is looking into the deaths of Gloria Huntley and Derrick Wilson, both of whom died while strapped to beds at Central State in Petersburg.

Huntley's attending psychiatrist warned a year before her death that mistreatment and repeated use of restraints could lead to her death because she suffered from epileptic seizures and asthma.

In another case, six staff members at Central State were charged in the beating of a patient in November.

The 15 members of the review commission will be chosen from private advocacy groups such as the Virginia Alliance for the Mentally Ill, experts on the legal rights of mental patients and from the psychiatric community.

SOUTHSIDE

Italians meet with O'Dell,

still believe he's innocent

BOYDTON - Four Italian officials met with death row inmate Joseph Roger O'Dell III Wednesday and said they came away more convinced than ever that O'Dell is innocent.

``We had no doubt he's innocent because he showed an extraordinary force'' during the two-hour meeting, Calogero Piscitello, a member of a European human rights commission, said through a translator. ``It was a very strong emotional experience.''

Added Luciano Neri: ``We are more and more convinced that Joseph O'Dell is innocent.''

O'Dell's case has been front-page news in Italy, which does not have capital punishment and where U.S. death-penalty cases frequently prompt protests.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in O'Dell's case on Tuesday, focusing on the retroactivity of its 1994 ruling that said sentencing juries sometimes must be told the alternative to a death sentence would be life in prison without chance of parole.

O'Dell was not allowed to tell that to the jurors who sentenced him in 1988 to die in Virginia's electric chair for a 1985 murder in Virginia Beach.

O'Dell, 55, contends he is innocent of killing Helen Schartner, a secretary, outside a Virginia Beach nightclub. He had challenged both his murder conviction and death sentence.

The court is expected to issue a ruling by July.

NORTHERN

Head-on crash kills three,

including sheriff's deputy

CALVERTON - Three people, including a sheriff's deputy, were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision in Fauquier County, police said.

Philip Couick, 56, a Prince William County deputy who lived in Culpeper, died when a Volkwagen Golf driven by Harrington Harris Jr., 37, of Warrenton, plowed into his pickup truck on the northbound side of Virginia 28, state police spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell said.

The collision killed Couick, Harris and a 35-year-old Culpeper County woman riding with Harris, Caldwell said.

Witnesses said Harris had been passing traffic on the wrong side of the road.

Couick retired after 20 years with Fairfax police and spent the last 10 years in the Prince William sheriff's office, Caldwell said. He was in uniform and on his way to work at the time of the crash.

COMING UP

Today

Richmond - John Kerr, British ambassador to the United States, speaks to the World Affairs Council of Greater Richmond.

Annual meeting of the Virginia Association of Economists at Crowne Plaza Hotel through March 21.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu