The trial of Anthony Oddone, who faces murder charges after being accused of strangling Hampton Bays resident Andrew Reister last summer, will begin in a Riverhead courtroom late next week with the start of jury selection scheduled for Thursday, October 1.

Pre-trial hearings will conclude in the Arthur M. Cromarty Criminal Courts Building in Riverhead on Monday, September 28. Also on Monday, the attorneys for the two sides will discuss the logistics of selecting jurors, including how Mr. Reister’s career as a corrections officer can be discussed without biasing the prospective panel.

Jury selection was originally scheduled to start on Tuesday, September 29, but has been postponed because Judge Randall Hinrichs is overseeing another trial that is not expected to conclude until early next week.

Mr. Oddone, 26, who has been held without bail at the New York City Jail on Rikers Island since his arrest, will be in the courtroom for Monday’s hearings.

The trial could take several weeks to conduct, but attorneys from both sides are keeping tight-lipped about how they plan to conduct their respective arguments in the case.

Though Mr. Oddone’s attorney, Manhattan criminal defender Sarita Kedia, has revealed little about her planned defense of the former caddy and military veteran, evidence presented at pre-trial hearings seems to point toward a claim of self-defense.

Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota’s office and Assistant District Attorney Denise Merrifield, who is handling the prosecution in the case, have yet to reveal whether they plan to argue that Mr. Oddone intentionally killed Mr. Reister or whether he should be found guilty of “depraved indifference” for continuing to hold the 40-year-old corrections officer in a headlock long after he had fallen unconscious.

While the prosecution and defense have not discussed any plea bargains, it is still possible that one or both sides could ask Judge Randall C. Hinrichs at the trial’s conclusion to instruct 
the jury to consider lesser charges. 
The judge could also order that the lesser charges be introduced even if no request is made by the defense or prosecution—though such action is rare.

“Intent is very hard to determine, and lots of times a defense attorney is willing to admit their client did something criminal but not what the DA is saying they did, and they will ask that a lesser charge be introduced,” said Steven Wilutis, a defense attorney and former Suffolk County assistant district attorney who has tried several criminal cases before Judge Hinrichs, but is not involved in the Oddone trial. “For the jury, it gives them a compromise verdict—to find him not guilty of the worst charges but not let him go entirely.”

Though he said he is not familiar with the facts in the Oddone case, in cases involving murder in the second degree, Mr. Wilutis said, a jury might be asked to consider alternative charges of second-degree manslaughter or even criminally negligent homicide, a minor felony that carries a maximum sentence of four years.

Mr. Oddone, a Farmingville resident, is charged with two counts of murder in the second degree stemming from the death of Mr. Reister, a father of two and a Suffolk County Department of Corrections officer, after a struggle in a Southampton Village tavern, where Mr. Reister was moonlighting as an ID checker.

According to police reports and evidence presented thus far in pre-trial hearings, Mr. Oddone went to the Southampton Publick House with two other friends on the night of August 6, 2008. Shortly after 1 a.m., he was told by Mr. Reister to get off a table he had climbed on top of to dance with a group of girls. A struggle ensued and Mr. Oddone, who is 6 feet 1 inch tall and about 175 pounds, wound up on top of Mr. Reister, who was 6 feet 4 inches tall and 250 pounds, with his arm wrapped around the larger man’s neck. Despite pleas by his friends and other patrons, and at least one attempt to physically pull him off Mr. Reister, Mr. Oddone did not release his grip, even after Mr. Reister had stopped struggling.

Mr. Oddone then fled the scene in a taxicab but was apprehended by Southampton Village Police less than a mile away.

Following the incident, Mr. Reister could not be revived by paramedics and lay in a coma for two days before being pronounced dead on August 9.

Mr. Reister worked at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead, next door to the courthouse where Mr. Oddone will be tried, for 15 years. Corrections officers from the jail, as well as other corrections departments around the metropolitan area, have attended arraignments and hearings in the trial in uniform. Mr. Oddone’s defense team has asked that the officers be barred from doing so during the trial itself because it may influence the jury. Judge Hinrichs has yet to rule on the request.

Mr. Oddone, who was an honors student at St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue, was working as a caddy at The Bridge golf club in Noyac at the time of the incident. Members of the exclusive club, where Mr. Oddone had worked for several summers, are believed to be funding his defense, though Ms. Kedia has declined to say who is paying her.