A Sister's Plea: Test the DNA

Her brother was executed. Now she wants to know if he was guilty

Sheila Knox sits in her backyard on a gravel road on the outskirts of Richmond, Va., and flips through old photographs of her brother Joseph O'Dell. It's hardly a typical family album. There's Bubba, as she calls him, in a schoolboy outfit, leaning up against his baby sister. Then a grownup Bubba hugging her when she visited him on Christmas Day at a Florida prison. And finally Bubba shortly before the Commonwealth of Virginia executed him by lethal injection. Knox believes they killed the wrong man. And she knows the state now has the tools to prove whether or not she...

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