Lori St John
American lawyer and author
Lori St John, also known as Lori Urs, is an American advocate against wrongful death penalty decisions. 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.
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, particularly from the Italian city of Palermo, as well as from Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II and the Italian and European parliaments, who petitioned unsuccessfully for O'Dell not to be executed. She was an investigator on O'Dell's legal team. She married the convicted murderer hours before his execution, partly in an effort to gain control of evidence. 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. Soon thereafter, before being executed by lethal injection on July 23, 1997, O'Dell pledged to love his bride "throughout eternity."
Her efforts pushed for greater use of DNA profiling in capital crimes cases. Her advocacy generated serious interest on the World Wide Web as well as in the nation of Italy, where the 1997 execution of O'Dell was watched by millions of television viewers.
The public source identifies “Lori St John” as american lawyer and author. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lori, John and American.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20748943. VIAF identifies the subject as 305452266. The Library of Congress control number is no2013126817. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lori St John” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.