Word: dna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Death usually forecloses further appeals. But O'Dell's supporters are trying to force prosecutors to turn over never tested sperm that was taken from the victim's body. At the time of O'Dell's trial, the samples weren't large enough to test, but advances in DNA technology now permit smaller amounts to be analyzed. O'Dell's supporters say testing is the only way to resolve whether O'Dell was guilty...
Prosecutors say, however, that state law allows them to destroy the sperm, which currently sits in an evidence locker in the Virginia Beach circuit-court clerk's office. Otherwise, relatives of "every executed inmate in Virginia would want to have his DNA evidence tested after the fact," says David Botkins, spokesman for the state's attorney general. A trial-court judge last month ruled that the evidence can be destroyed without testing, but an appeal is headed for the Virginia Supreme Court...
...Dell's side says the dispute raises a larger question: Shouldn't the state do everything it can to learn whether it is executing the right person? So far, DNA evidence has exonerated 63 people in U.S. prisons, including several on death row. The latest is Calvin Johnson, released last Tuesday after serving 16 years of a life sentence in Georgia for a murder that a DNA test now shows he didn't commit. But in the O'Dell case, says Paul Enzinna, a lawyer for the dead man's supporters, "the state is saying, 'We want to destroy...
...state is forced to permit the DNA test, there is a good chance it will prove O'Dell's guilt. Knox is eager to believe the best about her brother: that a 1975 kidnapping conviction was probably a setup, that his fatal knifing of a fellow inmate was self-defense. But to less loving eyes, O'Dell seems like a man who might well have been capable of killing Schartner. All the more reason, says Knox, that the state should hand over the evidence. "Let's test it and find...
...runs--more than any entire team in the American League. Within a few years, his assault on distant fences had bent baseball into a new and thrilling shape. His appetites were as prodigious as his home runs, his affinity for the crowd and the camera seemingly part of his dna. By the time he retired in 1935, Ruth had become, in the words of sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, "a national heirloom," a gift from one generation to the next, a treasure from an earlier time...