The eldest of six children in a working-class Cheektowaga family, O’Donnell attended parochial schools and was the first in her family to go to college. She chose Canisius College. Hers was Canisius’ first graduating class to include women. After graduation, she became a social worker “to make the world a better place,” and earned an MSW degree. She supported her husband while he was in law school, then decided to apply herself. She was a non-traditional student with two young children, and the other mothers in law school became her friends and support system.

She attended law school on the North Campus. Thomas Headrick was the dean. She loved law school, especially Constitutional Law and Labor Law. She liked Evidence and gravitated to being a litigator. When she was nine months pregnant, she applied to Richard Griffin’s firm and took a semester off from law school to work as a legal assistant for the plaintiffs in the famous Buffalo school desegregation case. That experience changed the course of her career.

After graduating second in her class, she interviewed with many Western New York law firms. As a woman with children, she wasn’t hired. But she was recommended to Judge M. Dolores Denman in the Appellate Division. She worked for three years as a law clerk for Judge Denman, who encouraged her to apply to the U.S. Attorney’s office. In 1985, she became an assistant United States Attorney.

Work focused primarily on white-collar crime and civil rights cases in the Justice Department. Throughout her initial career in the U.S. Attorney’s Office under Janet Reno, she was able to move up to become the first assistant U.S. Attorney, and then ultimately, in 1998, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York during the Clinton administration—the first woman in Western New York to hold that position. Significant cases included the Oklahoma City bombing, the Barnett Slepian shooting, the protection of reproductive rights and Reno’s initiative to provide re-entry services for formerly incarcerated persons.

A change of administration meant O'Donnell was out of a job. She worked at Hodgson Russ LLP for five years, practicing law, but knew that was not what she wanted to do. She ran unsuccessfully in 2006 against Andrew Cuomo for state attorney general. In 2007, Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed her as commissioner of the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, working to improve the criminal justice system. Spitzer then appointed her as assistant secretary to the governor for criminal justice, serving as the governor’s top criminal justice adviser and overseeing the State Police, the Division of Parole and the Department of Corrections. She also helped develop statewide criminal justice and public safety policies and worked on homeland security efforts.

Trying to use these various positions to improve the justice system is what O’Donnell considers her greatest accomplishment. Her social work career came into play, with her experience in systems and systems change, as she dealt with policy changes that affected the state or the nation. O’Donnell has now formed a non-profit and collaborates with several community organizations on re-entry programs to assist formerly incarcerated persons and their families.

“I was a president of the UB Law Alumni Association when we started this oral history program, and I thought it would be kind of these old pillars of UB law school to be doing these interviews,” she said. “I never thought I would be doing one myself.”