Convicted Killer O’Dell Is Married, Then Executed

Hours after he got married, a death row inmate whose cause was championed by the pope, Mother Teresa and the Italian government was executed Wednesday night for a 1985 rape and murder he said he didn’t commit.

Joseph Roger O’Dell III, 54, died by injection at 9:16 p.m. EDT after the Supreme Court rejected his last-minute appeal.

Earlier in the day, Gov. George F. Allen rejected a plea for clemency, and a federal appeals court Tuesday had refused to order newer, more sophisticated DNA tests of semen taken from the victim. O’Dell’s lawyers had argued that the tests could prove him innocent in the slaying of Helen Schartner.

O’Dell had also argued that he should have been allowed to tell the jurors at his sentencing in 1986 that, if they did not give him the death penalty, he would have to spend the rest of his life in prison.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that juries in capital cases sometimes must be told defendants have no chance of parole. But last month, the high court said the ruling is not retroactive.

The case has gotten extraordinary attention in Italy, where opposition to capital punishment runs high and where Lori Urs, the Boston University law student O’Dell married Wednesday in a cellblock next to the death chamber, has worked the media.

A death row chaplain officiated as O’Dell and Urs exchanged vows through the bars of his cell. Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking,” and prison guards served as official witnesses. For security reasons, the newlyweds were not permitted to touch.

About a dozen opponents of capital punishment showed up outside the prison.

At O’Dell’s trial, prosecutors showed that the wounds on Schartner’s head matched the shape of a pellet gun owned by O’Dell. Tire tracks from the crime scene matched O’Dell’s car. Semen on the victim’s body matched O’Dell’s blood and enzyme types. And hairs in O’Dell’s car matched those of the victim.