Lori St John

Lori St John, also known as Lori Urs, is an American advocate against wrongful death penalty decisions.[2][3] In addition, she is a certified public accountant and author.

In the early 1990s, St John studied law at the New England School of Law and later at Rutgers School of Law.[1][4]

In the 1990s, she led a determined public relations effort to prevent the execution of convicted murderer Joseph Roger O’Dell. Her public relations campaign in the media drew widespread international support,[5] particularly from the Italian city of Palermo, as well as from Mother Teresa[1] and Pope John Paul II[1] and the Italian and European parliaments,[1] who petitioned unsuccessfully for O'Dell not to be executed.[6] She was an investigator on O'Dell's legal team.[7] She married the convicted murderer hours before his execution, partly in an effort to gain control of evidence.[8] The marriage was officiated by a death row chaplain, with vows exchanged between bars of the cell, and the newlyweds were not permitted to touch for security reasons.[9] Soon thereafter, before being executed by lethal injection on July 23, 1997, O'Dell pledged to love his bride "throughout eternity."[6]

Her efforts pushed for greater use of DNA profiling in capital crimes cases.[8] Her advocacy generated serious interest on the World Wide Web as well as in the nation of Italy,[10] where the 1997 execution of O'Dell was watched by millions of television viewers.[11] According to an account in the Los Angeles Times, O'Dell became the "unofficial martyr of Italy's campaign against capital punishment in the rest of the world."[11] O'Dell was buried in the city of Palermo, Italy, even though he had never visited there.[12][13][14]

In 1998, she was briefly in the news when she helped secure the release of her teenage daughter, who was being held hostage.[2]