Officer’s Expunged Conviction Angers Ex-Wife

The action of the judge is couched in an obscure legalism, but its message is clear enough to Barbara O’Dell: As far the State of California is concerned, she was never battered by her estranged husband, never abused, even though he was convicted of that offense four years ago.

“As far as I’m concerned, it invalidates me as the victim of a crime,” said O’Dell, 39, who has since divorced. “In essence, he got away with it.”

On Jan. 17, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Det. Rodolfo O’Dell stood before a Superior Court judge in Pomona and had his 1993 conviction for spousal abuse “expunged,” or officially stricken from the record.

No one notified Barbara O’Dell of this action, not even the deputy district attorney who was present. She learned of it only after reading reports in The Times earlier this month.

Two other sheriff’s deputies have had their domestic-abuse convictions expunged recently in the latest fallout from a 1996 federal law prohibiting people with domestic violence convictions from carrying firearms.

For Rodolfo O’Dell and the others, the new statute meant they were no longer eligible to work as peace officers--until they had their records expunged.

In seeking to have his conviction erased, O’Dell, 42, argued that it was unfair to deprive him of the right to work as the result of a law that didn’t exist when he pleaded no contest to the charge against him.

But for Barbara O’Dell, the court action was just the latest insult in a nightmarish encounter with the criminal justice system. The way she sees it, her estranged husband, now a 20-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department, seemed to have friends looking out for him at every turn.

To feminist groups that monitor law enforcement agencies, Barbara O’Dell’s experience symbolizes law enforcement’s reluctance to police its own. They contrast studies that show domestic violence occurring in up to 40% of the families of law enforcement officers with the fact that only one deputy in the 8,000-member Sheriff’s Department has a domestic-violence conviction on his record.

Penny Harrington of the Center for Women and Policing contends law enforcement agencies have arrested officers on suspicion of domestic violence only if the case was “so egregious, there had to be a death or severe bodily injury.”

Efforts to contact Rodolfo O’Dell were unsuccessful. His attorney, Henry Salcido, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The incident that led to O’Dell’s conviction began on July 9, 1992. At the time, Barbara O’Dell said, the couple were legally separated and she had obtained a restraining order against him.

When she returned home that July day, O’Dell testified in a preliminary hearing, she found Rodolfo waiting for her in the garage of her Covina home. He told her he had left the woman he had been seeing and wanted to come back.

When Barbara repeatedly asked him to leave, Rodolfo turned angry, she testified. And then violent. He began to choke her.

“I could feel all my bones crack from my neck all the way down,” she told a Covina court. “I was very fearful. I couldn’t breathe and I could hear myself gurgling.”

Rodolfo later bit and raped her four times, she testified.

Rodolfo O’Dell was first charged with four felony counts of spousal rape. A mistrial was declared on those charges after it was revealed that the prosecutor had withheld evidence from the defense. O’Dell later plead no contest to one charge of spousal battery, a misdemeanor.

Even before the July 1992 incident, Barbara said, she had called her husband’s Sheriff’s Department superiors to complain about his abusive behavior. When he was arrested, she said, a supervisor told her that her complaints would have been handled better “if I had been just an average citizen. He said I would have got more help. But because I was the spouse of a deputy sheriff they moved slower.”

During the preliminary hearing, Barbara O’Dell alleges, employees from the district attorney’s office in Pomona showed up in the courtroom to offer moral support for Rodolfo because he was a courthouse regular and friend.

“They knew him and they were supporting him” she said. “‘It was very uncomfortable.”

Frank Sundstedt, the supervisor at the Pomona courthouse, who was not stationed there at the time, said he doubted that staff members would engage in such conduct.

After O’Dell’s conviction, investigators from the Sheriff’s Department internal affairs unit questioned her about the alleged abuse. Soon, she said, “the conversation went toward that it would be better for us and my sons if he [Rodolfo] kept working.” She says they told her she was threatening her family’s livelihood.

Barbara’s response: “I told them what he did was wrong and that he should be held accountable.”

Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Robert Stoneman said it would be “totally against policy” to discourage victims of crimes from seeking justice.

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“Nothing in the sheriff’s internal investigation reveals any complaint by Mrs. O’Dell about misconduct by investigators from any agency,” he said. “If any allegation like that was made to us, we would have investigated that back then.”

Barbara O’Dell acknowledges she never filed a formal complaint about the conduct of deputies investigating the case.

Now an employee at a San Gabriel Valley department store, she said she tried to put the case behind her--until she learned her ex-husband had the conviction erased.

“I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore,” she said. “I wanted to go on with my life and I wanted it to be over.”

O’Dell has since been promoted to the rank of detective, according to court documents.

At the January hearing on the expunging, Judge Alfonso M. Bazan found that O’Dell was likely to “use a firearm in a safe and a lawful manner.” (The judge declined to comment, saying he never discusses his rulings.)

Dan Baker, the deputy district attorney assigned to the motion to expunge the conviction, said he had only a vague recollection of the proceedings. And Sundstedt, Baker’s supervisor at the Pomona courthouse, said prosecutors were under no legal obligation to notify the victim of the crime that it might be expunged.

“I can’t see that the system did anything more favorable for the defendant than any other defendant would be entitled to under the law,” Sundstedt said. He said that if a victim specifically asked to be informed of an expungement, he would accommodate that request.

Under California law, defendants convicted of most misdemeanors can apply to have their convictions erased as long as they’ve complied with the terms of their probation.

In his petition to have his conviction expunged, O’Dell’s attorney argued that he had “successfully completed a residential sobriety program, remarried, started a new family, purchased a new home, has become a born-again Christian, and has been a law-abiding citizen since his 1993 conviction.”

Salcido argued that it was unfair to deprive O’Dell of his ability to be a peace officer because he agreed to plead no contest on the abuse charge on the expressed condition that he would be allowed to carry a firearm and return to his job.

Depriving O’Dell of the right to work as a deputy as the result of a law passed two years after his conviction, Salcido argued, would constitute an ex post facto penalty.

In response, the judge struck the conviction. (Although the action eliminates the case from O’Dell’s criminal record, the files remain public; a reporter examined them two weeks ago.) But for Barbara O’Dell, the case and the events of that July day can never be erased.

“I can relive it every day, like it was yesterday,” she said. “For me, that will never go away, it will always be in my mind.”