Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 15

Thread: Bennie L. Adams - Ohio

  1. #1
    Guest
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    5,534

    Bennie L. Adams - Ohio



    Gina Tenney



    Bennie Adams


    Summary of Offense:

    On December 29, 1985, Bennie Adams murdered 19-year-old Gina Tenney in Youngstown. Ms. Tenney was a student at Youngstown State University and lived in the apartment above Adams. Adams raped and strangled Tenney before throwing her body into the Mahoning River. The murder became a cold case until the DNA from the rape kit, which police preserved for over 22 years, was matched with Adams' DNA.

    Adams was sentenced to death in 2008.

  2. #2
    Guest
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    5,534
    October 31, 2008

    Adams Sentenced to Death

    It is the 1st death sentence imposed here in 4 1/2 years.

    Bennie Adams bettered himself by taking college courses and becoming an educational aide in prison, but he has not undergone fundamental rehabilitation, according to the judge who sentenced him to death for the 1985 murder of Gina Tenney.

    "Mr. Adams, you have no remorse, and you have not accepted responsibility for your wrongdoing," said Judge Timothy E. Franken of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, who imposed the death sentence Thursday. "Your character is not that of a rehabilitated man," the judge added.

    Judge Franken set Adams' execution by lethal injection for March 2, 2009, but Dawn Cantalamessa, assistant county prosecutor, said mandatory appeals to the 7th District Court of Appeals and the Ohio Supreme Court will delay the execution beyond that date.

    It was the 1st time a judge pronounced a death sentence in the Mahoning County Courthouse since Judge Maureen A. Cronin imposed the death penalty in February 2004 on John Drummond Jr. in the shooting death of 3-month-old Jiyen C. Dent Jr. Drummond remains on death row.

    Judge Franken imposed the sentence on Adams the day after a jury of 8 women and 4 men recommended death over 3 life sentence options.

    The same jury had convicted Adams of aggravated murder with a death-penalty specification a week earlier.

    Tenney, a 19-year-old Youngstown State University student, who was Adams' upstairs neighbor in an Ohio Avenue duplex, was strangled Dec. 29, 1985. Her frozen body was found in the Mahoning River near West Avenue the next day.

    Adams, 51, was indicted in the case last year after a DNA match was found in evidence police had preserved for 22 years.

    After his 2004 release from prison, where he had served an 18-year term for the rape, robbery and kidnapping of a Boardman woman, Adams got a job, took care of his mother, bought a house for his daughter, his grandchildren and himself, and led a law-abiding life, the judge noted.

    The judge then added: "Over all of Mr. Adams rehabilitation hovers the ghost of Gina Tenney."

    Adams did not make a statement at his sentencing.

    "We feel it's an appropriate sentence in this case," Cantalamessa said after court. Prosecutors allege Adams raped, robbed and kidnapped Tenney and burglarized her apartment in conjunction with the murder.

    Although the six-year statute of limitation had expired on those nonmurder charges, they became elements in support of the death-penalty specification, of which the jury convicted Adams.

    "My heart is heavy," Lula Adams, 71, who resides on the city's South Side, said after her son was sentenced.

    She added: "I'm a child of the King and He will carry me through. And I do believe before he's put to death, the truth will be found."

    She has told city police 2 rocks were thrown through a window of her East LaClede Avenue home, damaging a screen the night before her son was sentenced.

    The police report says the episode happened at 8:50 p.m. Wednesday. She told police she believed the rock-throwing by unknown people was linked to her son's trial.

    Lula Adams asked whether there are any unanswered questions about the case and suggested prosecutors need to ask themselves whether they accused and obtained a conviction against the right person.

    Lou DeFabio, the lead defense lawyer, noted after court that one of the prosecution's witnesses identified a man other than Adams from a lineup as the man she saw on the night of Tenney’s death at an ATM, where Tenney's card was used.

    Martin P. Desmond, assistant county prosecutor, characterized the evidence of Adams' guilt as overwhelming.

    The 12-member jury that convicted Adams was all white except for 1 black female member, and there was 1 black female among the 4 alternates.

    “Whether Gina Tenney was white or black or whether Bennie Adams was white or black, this outcome would have been the same,” Desmond said. Adams is black. Tenney was white.

    Desmond said there were several dissimilarities between the Adams case and that of Michael A. Davis, the young white man accused of killing 6 people by setting a Jan. 23 house fire, 5 of them black. Davis received a 310-year prison term, but not a death sentence.

    Davis has a low IQ and was barely 18 when he committed his crimes, and that jury did not believe he intended to kill his victims, Desmond said.

    Adams, however, was 28 when Tenney died, is intelligent, and took college courses in prison; and the jury found he intentionally killed Tenney, Desmond added.

    DeFabio acknowledged the dissimilarities in age and intelligence between Davis and Adams.

    But he said having just 1 black juror on a panel of 12 doesn't adequately represent blacks, who comprise 15.3 % of the county’s population based on the 2000 Census.

    DeFabio noted that he challenged the prosecution’s dismissal of two black jurors without giving a reason; but he said the prosecution then offered race-neutral reasons for excusing them, and the judge accepted those race-neutral explanations.

    Their dismissal will be an issue in the appeal, he said.

    (Source: The Youngstown Vindicator)

  3. #3
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217

    Theresa Lattanzi


    RELATED:

    Rape victim finds courage to speak out about the crime 25 years later

    ALLIANCE — Theresa Lattanzi doesn’t remember how she told the story. The words just flowed.

    “Say a prayer for me before I do this,” she asked friends. Never before had she publicly told the story of how she was kidnapped at gunpoint, raped and robbed 25 years ago. Now she was about to step behind a lectern and face an audience of cops, prosecutors, victim advocates and press. She grabbed a stress ball. She reminded herself of all the speeches she’d given around the country as an educator.

    The truth was, none had ever been like this.

    For a quarter of a century, there had been two Theresas. The driven career-woman and mother who somehow found time to join a long list of community agencies; and the crime victim.

    The two had never shared a microphone.

    Lattanzi feared that talking about being a victim would hurt her career.

    People don’t want to hear about post-traumatic stress or mental health problems or what you’ve been through, she explained.

    But in retirement, the 59-year-old former Alliance school administrator finally felt comfortable telling her story in hopes it might help other victims.

    “I have found out that keeping it in is much worse,” she said.



    “I’ll make the story as short as I can, but what I was told is, it was the most horrific crime in Ohio that had ever been committed, and the victim lived.” Lattanzi’s April 14 speech at Walsh University during National Crime Victims’ Rights Week.

    Overhill Road.

    The curving, tree-lined street in Boardman is home to nice houses with well-maintained lawns, just as it was shortly after midnight on Aug. 14, 1985.

    Lattanzi eased her gray 1983 Cadillac up to the stoplight at Glenwood Avenue. About an hour before, the 33-year-old had been at a party in Ashtabula County with former colleagues from a vocational school where she used to work.

    A left turn, then a right, and she would be home.

    Bang. Another car jarred the back of the Cadillac.

    Lattanzi put down her window to tell the other driver to call the police. A man held a gun to her head and threatened to shoot.

    Move over, he told her.

    She did.



    Despite being nervous, Lattanzi appeared calm and poised during her speech. The audience listened in silence.

    “I knew by the things that they did to me, it wasn’t their first time.”

    Lattanzi remembers there being three assailants.

    She was blindfolded and gagged. The men stole the gold necklace her husband had given her as a gift, the gold band from her mother’s wedding set that she had worn since she was 16 and other jewelry. They bound her hands and feet with rope.

    They stole her house keys. Pictures of her family. Even the research she had done for her superintendent’s license was taken from the car.

    “It was like clockwork what they did,” said Lattanzi. “It was very methodical.”

    They drove her to a house on the south side of Youngstown.

    Despite the blindfold, she could still see down. She tried to keep track of how many streets they passed. When they got to the house, she counted the number of steps and tried to remember the color of the bricks and carpet.

    “The worst part of it was not the rapes, not the robbery, not the kidnapping, but a gun to your head for 4 1/2 hours, because that kills you,” Lattanzi said.

    She was raped repeatedly. The men forced her to give them bank information and left her naked and bound on a dirt basement floor while they stole money from her account.

    She prayed to see her daughter again. She lied to the men and said she wouldn’t tell anyone what they did to her. Her husband would beat her if he knew, she claimed. Her father-in-law would kill everyone. Her mother, widowed just months before, couldn’t bear the news.

    “There was always a discussion of whether they were going to kill me,” she said.

    The men let her live.

    They put Lattanzi, clothed again but still bound, gagged and blindfolded, in the back seat of her car. They drove around five or six minutes and untied her.

    “Don’t move or we’ll kill you,” they told her when the car finally stopped in a wooded area.

    Then they left.

    Lattanzi listened as her attackers’ footsteps faded. She thought about her 4-year-old daughter at home.

    “OK, God, I’m going to either live or die,” she said to herself.

    She ripped off the blindfold. Her keys were still in the car.



    “I looked at my family and my friends, and I said, ‘We will go to court.’ ”

    A body in the Mahoning River proved to be the break in Lattanzi’s case.

    After authorities pulled Youngstown State University student Gina Gay Tenney from the water on Dec. 30, 1985, they identified a man staying in the apartment below hers, Bennie L. Adams, as a suspect. Adams also became a suspect in Lattanzi’s case.

    Immediately after being left in the car, Lattanzi had driven to the Boardman police station, but for months she hadn’t been able to identify her attackers from the photos police showed her of possible suspects. Investigators even had her see a forensic hypnotist, she said. While investigating Adams for Tenney’s murder, police found some of Lattanzi’s jewelry, as well as a tire and a jack from a Cadillac in a car belonging to Adams’ girlfriend, said retired Youngstown police detective William Blanchard.

    Shown mugshots of Adams and others, Lattanzi identified him and a juvenile named Sam Smith Jr. as two of the attackers.

    Smith, 17 at the time of crime, pleaded guilty. (He served eight years, and later did time in Indiana. In January, a Mahoning County jury convicted Smith of rape, kidnapping, aggravated robbery and other charges in a new case. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison.)

    Adams went on trial in November 1986 for Lattanzi’s case. A Mahoning County jury deliberated for about four hours before convicting him of kidnapping, rape and aggravated robbery. He was sentenced to three consecutive terms of 10 to 25 years. Adams got out in 2004. Prosecutors used DNA evidence to convict him in 2008 of Tenney’s murder, and he is on death row.

    According to Mahoning County prosecutors, Smith and Adams were the only defendants convicted of assaulting Lattanzi. The fate of a third accomplice, who was alluded to but never named in press accounts or court records pertaining to Adams’ trial, is unclear.

    Back in 1986, police said they never had seen such a brutal rape case where the victim survived, and that the trial never would have happened without Lattanzi.

    “We can’t give a person the guts to go through with the trial,” Boardman Police Chief William Walter told The Vindicator after the verdict. “I can’t tell you how much she did for womanhood.”



    “I vowed that that night was not going to make me different. Has it made me different? Oh, yes it has.”

    After the kidnapping, Lattanzi and her family lived under police protection. She still has nightmares and flashbacks. She doesn’t like to shop at night. She feels trapped when stopped at an intersection or railroad crossing. She continues to get treatment for post-traumatic stress and depression.

    Pain and hardship never go away, Lattanzi said. They are things you deal with every single day.

    “You always need an escape, and work was my escape,” she explained.

    Lattanzi started working as an assistant principal at Alliance High School soon after the kidnapping. At first, she commuted from Boardman, but by the time the case went to trial she had moved to Alliance with her daughter and then-husband.

    News about the kidnapping had traveled fast in the Youngstown area.

    “The hardest part was immediately after or a few months after, I’d be in a restaurant and I’d hear people talking about ‘that poor woman,’ and at that point I didn’t want the sympathy,” she said.

    Family members, friends and neighbors in her new town helped her. She focused on her job, reaching out to kids, some who were in their own tough situations.

    Although her bosses and some of her staff knew Lattanzi had been a victim, few others did. She was afraid to speak out publicly, thinking it would hurt her career, she said.

    A few years into retirement, she feels more settled now and has begun sharing her story and hopes it will help others. You never know what someone else is going through in life, and no one has to keep it in without getting help, she said.

    “I’ve had help for 26 years, not only from my friends and family but from doctors, too,” Lattanzi said. “And it’s not an embarrassment. When you have a need, there’s a place to fix it.”

    “By the grace of my family and friends and a few that are here today, is why I’m still here, and why I had a magnificent, successful career.”

    http://www.cantonrep.com/carousel/x1...25-years-later

  4. #4
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Death-penalty appeal begins Monday

    Jury-related issues will loom large as the 7th District Court of Appeals hears oral arguments at 10 a.m. Wednesday in the case of Bennie L. Adams, 54, who is on death row for the 1985 murder of his neighbor, Gina Tenney, according to documents filed with the court.

    Nearly three years ago, then-Judge Timothy E. Franken of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court followed the recommendation of the jury by sentencing Adams to death by lethal injection.

    Tenney, a 19-year-old Youngstown State University student who was Adams’ upstairs neighbor in an Ohio Avenue duplex, was strangled Dec. 29, 1985. Her frozen body was found in the Mahoning River near West Avenue the next day.

    Adams was indicted for the murder in 2007 after a DNA match was found in evidence police had preserved for 22 years.

    In their effort to save Adams’ life, Adams’ appellate lawyers, John B. Juhasz and Lynn A. Maro, have filed with the appeals court a 529-page written brief containing 21 allegations of legal and procedural error in Adams’ trial.

    Those allegations of error cover a broad range of issues from jury selection and instructions to admissibility of trial testimony and evidence, trial location and the constitutionality of the death penalty.

    One of those allegations is that Judge Franken rushed jury selection, thereby making meaningful questioning by the lawyers of each potential juror impossible.

    “If the time allotted was over, the trial court interrupted and cut off questioning, even before the juror could answer,” Juhasz and Maro complained.

    However, Ralph M. Rivera and Martin P. Desmond, assistant county prosecutors, argued that Adams “was afforded his due-process right to a fair and impartial jury” because Judge Franken gave the lawyers “a reasonable opportunity to inquire into the jurors’ exposure to pretrial publicity and their views on the death penalty.”

    Juhasz and Maro argued that Adams was denied a trial by a fair and impartial jury because his trial lawyers failed to ask Judge Franken to move the trial to another Ohio county after extensive publicity in Youngstown.

    Rivera and Desmond argued Adams got a fair trial and that pretrial publicity did not prejudice the jury. “Thus, a change of venue was neither warranted, nor necessary,” they wrote.

    Juhasz and Maro argued that Adams “was denied a fair and impartial jury and equal protection of the laws when his jury was not composed of a fair cross-section of the community” due to racially discriminatory dismissals of potential jurors by prosecutors, which Judge Franken approved.

    Rivera and Desmond replied, however, that the jury represented a fair cross section of the community “and the state did not use its peremptory challenges to racially discriminate.” Adams is black; Tenney was white.

    Immediately after Judge Franken imposed the death sentence on Adams on Oct. 30, 2008, Lou DeFabio, one of Adams’ trial defense lawyers, said the lone black person on the panel of 12 jurors didn’t adequately represent blacks, who constituted 15.3 percent of the county’s population in the 2000 census.

    DeFabio noted that he challenged the prosecution’s dismissal of two black jurors; but he said the prosecution then offered race-neutral reasons for excusing them, and the judge accepted the prosecution’s explanations.

    The three-judge panel that will hear the arguments at the appellate court’s headquarters at 131 W. Federal St. consists of Judges Gene Donofrio, Joseph J. Vukovich and Cheryl L. Waite.

    The court has ordered that Adams remain imprisoned, but it has stayed his execution while it considers his appeal.

    http://www.vindy.com/news/2011/aug/2...begins-monday/

  5. #5
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Judges find delay significant

    The 22-year delay in finding the DNA match linking Bennie L. Adams to the 1985 murder of Gina Tenney was a significant issue for all three 7th District Court of Appeals judges who heard oral arguments in the capital murder case.

    “If the evidence was overwhelming back in ’85 and ’86, can’t we make a presumption that 22 years is inherently detrimental?,” asked Judge Joseph J. Vukovich.

    “Respectfully, I don’t agree that it was overwhelming in ’85 or ’86,” Martin P. Desmond, an assistant Mahoning County prosecutor, replied during Wednesday’s oral arguments.

    Blood typing in 1986 could only have narrowed the sample from Adams down to 4 percent of the black population, Desmond said.

    “Four percent is a large number compared to DNA, where there’s a 1 in 39 trillion chance” that the DNA belonged to someone other than Adams, Desmond said.

    “The science that they tested him with in 2006 actually was being used by other states in 1995, so we have an additional 11 years of delay,” Judge Gene Donofrio observed.

    Desmond said Ohio didn’t begin cold-case DNA testing until after Marc Dann was elected state attorney general in 2006.

    Judge Cheryl L. Waite recalled that the state instituted cold-case DNA testing because a grant made funds available for it. “Simply because someone else was going to foot the bill, does that make it reasonable?” she asked concerning the lag.

    “I don’t think it was an unreasonable delay,” Desmond said, noting that the lag was related in part to the move of the state’s crime lab and that the DNA testing process is much faster now than it was during the 1990s.

    Tenney, a 19-year-old Youngstown State University student, who was Adams’ upstairs neighbor in an Ohio Avenue duplex, was strangled Dec. 29, 1985. Her frozen body was found in the Mahoning River near West Avenue the next day.

    Adams was indicted for the murder in 2007 after a DNA match was found in evidence police had preserved for 22 years. Adams, 54, is on death row after having been convicted of killing Tenney in a 2008 jury trial.

    Undue delay in prosecution is one of 21 allegations of legal and procedural error by Attys. John B. Juhasz and Lynn A. Maro, who are trying to reverse Adams’ conviction and save his life.

    Other allegations of error pertain to jury selection and instructions, admissibility of trial testimony and evidence, trial location and the constitutionality of the death penalty.

    Judge Waite said the appeals court would take the case under advisement and rule at a later date.

    http://www.vindy.com/news/2011/aug/2...y-significant/

  6. #6
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Death sentence upheld in YSU student’s slaying

    YOUNGSTOWN - The 7th District Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence of the man convicted of the 1985 murder of a Youngstown State University student.

    Bennie Adams appealed to the court after having been found guilty and sentenced to death in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in 2008 for the murder of Gina Tenney.

    The appellate court heard oral arguments in the case in August and issued a ruling Friday.

    Tenney, a 19-year-old YSU student who was Adams’ upstairs neighbor in an Ohio Avenue duplex, was strangled Dec. 29, 1985. Her frozen body was found in the Mahoning River near West Avenue the next day.

    Adams was indicted for the murder in 2007 after a DNA match was found in evidence that police had preserved for 22 years. Adams, 54, is on death row.

    Undue delay in prosecution is one of the 21 allegations of legal and procedural error presented by Attys. John B. Juhasz and Lynn A. Maro, who are representing Adams. The court filing included 528 pages.

    Juhasz said he had not seen the court’s opinion as of Friday afternoon and would not comment on what Adams would do next. He did say the case could be appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court.

    The attorneys, in arguing undue delay in prosecution, pointed out that Adams was not indicted for the murder until 22 years after the crime even though he was arrested for receiving the woman’s stolen property. They also claim Adams’ right to a speedy trial was denied.

    The court rejected the claims, however, saying that Adams’ due-process rights were not violated if the reasons for the delay are taken into account. The court’s answer says the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation did not get accreditation for the needed DNA test until 2000 and began accepting more requests for cold-case analyses in 2004 when grant money was available.

    Other allegations of error pertain to jury selection and instructions, admissibility of trial testimony and evidence, trial location and the constitutionality of the death penalty.

    The defense attorneys claimed Adams’ trial should have been moved to a different location because of pretrial publicity, but the appeals court said changing venue, or electing not to do so, for the trial attorneys was a matter of strategy.

    Adams’ attorneys also claimed the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment. The appeals court, however, ruled that the claim is lacking in merit.

    Members of the Tenney family did not wish to comment on the court’s decision Friday.

    http://www.vindy.com/news/2011/oct/1...u-students-sl/

  7. #7
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    Attorneys claim delay in prosecution should rule out death penalty

    By MARC KOVAC
    Dix Capital Bureau

    COLUMBUS -- The state's high court is considering whether a Mahoning County man should be executed for the rape and murder of a Youngstown State University student nearly three decades ago.

    The Ohio Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning in the case against Bennie Adams, who hopes to overturn the conviction and death sentence he received for the 1985 crime. Among other issues, justices have to determine whether capital punishment is appropriate in a murder case with a conviction that came after the statute of limitations for related crimes expired.

    Gina Tenney was in her second year at YSU when a muskrat trapper found her lifeless body floating in the Mahoning River. A coroner determined the 19-year-old had been raped, tied up and smothered and strangled and was dead before being dumped in the water, according to documents.

    Tenney lived in an upstairs apartment in a duplex on Ohio Avenue; Adams lived in the downstairs apartment, just down a common stairway. According to documents, Tenney told friends she was scared of Adams, who stared through his window and tried to strike up conversations with her.

    Shortly after the crime, officers found Tenney's bankcard, the keys to her car and apartment, her television and a potholder in Adams' apartment. Witnesses also testified they had observed Adams attempting to withdraw money using Tenney's card and driving off in the victim's vehicle.

    Despite the evidence and testimony, the case stretched out over two decades until DNA evidence could be properly tested, tying Adams to the crime. He was convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to death after serving 18 years for rape in a separate crime.

    Adams argues that he did not receive a fair trial, noting more than 20 errors that were made during the proceedings. In court filings, he said officers did not have a proper warrant to enter and search his apartment, and his legal counsel did not have sufficient time to question potential jurors.

    "If we have a jury that is not fairly and impartially selected, you can't say that their verdict is reliably obtained," said Lynn Maro, one of his attorneys.

    Adams also argues that 22 years was an unreasonable amount of time to bring an indictment, considering no new evidence was offered.

    "This was a 22-year delay in this prosecution that was re-instituted solely because a detective saw Mr. Adams walking along the street and realized he had been released from prison," Maro said. "There was no new evidence when Mr. Adams was arrested on Oct. 3, 2007. The delay was prejudicial to this defendant."

    But prosecutors countered that multiple witnesses, physical evidence and DNA all tie Adams to the crime.

    Justice Paul Pfeifer pressed Maro on the DNA evidence.

    "That's just pretty hard to get around in terms of your defendant," he said.

    But Justice Bill O'Neill questioned whether Adams was actually convicted of rape, robbery, burglary or kidnapping - offenses that, when accompanying murder, can lead to a death sentence.

    Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor noted that the statute of limitations for those crimes had expired by the time charges were brought against Adams.

    "In a normal case, you would have a separate conviction for one these felonies, and you would have the felony murder specification, correct?" said Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger. "So we would be going into new territory to say when you have a passage of time like this, you don't need a separate conviction to support the felony murder spec."

    Justices are considering arguments in the case. There is no timeframe for their decision.

    http://www.the-daily-record.com/loca...-death-penalty

  8. #8
    Jan
    Guest
    Suspect in 1985 Youngstown rape, murder freed from death penalty

    The death sentence of a man convicted of killing a college student 30 years ago is invalid because prosecutors failed to prove he committed aggravated burglary during the crime, a divided Ohio Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

    The 5-2 decision also said that because the burglary evidence wasn’t proved at trial, defendant Bennie Adams can’t face the death penalty again when his case goes back to a judge for re-sentencing.

    Adams, 58, was long a suspect in the 1985 rape and murder of Youngstown State University Gina Tenney but was not charged until 2007 when DNA evidence was submitted for updated testing procedures.

    Prosecutors never settled on where the attack happened and never distinguished between trespass and aggravated burglary in allegations that Adams had gone into Tenney’s apartment afterward, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said, writing for the majority.

    If Adams abducted Tenney outside her apartment, she could not have been present when he returned with her keys, O’Connor said. A resident’s presence in a dwelling during a burglary is one factor used to argue for an aggravated burglary charge.

    “It is also possible that Adams accosted Tenney outside her apartment, forced her to admit him to the upstairs apartment, and raped and killed her there,” O’Connor said. “But this scenario is purely speculative. The state presented no direct physical evidence to establish where the rape occurred.”

    The case was complicated by the fact the statutes of limitations had passed for prosecuting Adams on stand-alone charges of rape, kidnapping, aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary.

    Normally, having those stand-alone charges would help in a capital case, said Ralph Rivera, an assistant Mahoning County prosecutor who had asked the court to uphold the death sentence.

    Instead, those crimes were alleged only as additional factors to the aggravated murder, which are required under Ohio law to make someone eligible for the death penalty, he said.

    A message was left for Adams’ attorney. Adams had pleaded not guilty in the case, and an attorney had questioned whether the right person was arrested.

    Justice Terrence O’Donnell dissented, saying it didn’t make sense that the court upheld Adams’ aggravated murder conviction but not the death sentence.

    “If the evidence of guilt is sufficient to support a finding of guilt of aggravated murder, it is also sufficient to uphold the penalty recommended by the same jury that found guilt,” O’Donnell wrote.

    Tenney, 19, lived in an apartment above Adams in Youngstown and had grown fearful of him, according to the Supreme Court ruling. Her body was discovered in the Mahoning River on Dec. 30, 1985.

    At the time, Adams was preliminarily charged with receiving stolen property because Tenney’s ATM card was discovered in his jacket, though he was never indicted.

    A year later, he was convicted of kidnapping, rape and aggravated robbery in an unrelated case in Boardman, according to Thursday’s court decision. He served nearly 18 years in prison before he was released in 2004.

    http://wkbn.com/2015/10/01/suspect-i...death-penalty/

  9. #9
    Senior Member Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Posts
    239
    This is ridiculous. Sometimes when someone has a sentence changed on a "technicality" I can completely understand why a failure to follow a proper procedure should lead to a new trial. But his sentence changed basically because they don't know if he grabbed her outside, forced her inside, then raped and murdered her, or if she was already inside and he burst in? That's horrible. That's one of the reasons (among many) people get fed up with the judicial system. I agree with O'Donnell. This doesn't make any sense.

  10. #10
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Court Rejects Murder Conviction Appeal

    The Ohio Supreme Court today affirmed the aggravated murder conviction of a Youngstown man whose previous death sentence had been vacated.

    The Supreme Court voted 6-1 to uphold the conviction of Bennie Adams for the 1985 murder of Youngstown State University student Gina Tenney. In 2015, the Supreme Court returned Adams’ case to a Mahoning County Common Pleas Court for a new sentencing hearing, noting that the state is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution’s double jeopardy clause from seeking the death penalty on remand.

    In a per curiam opinion, the Supreme Court today explained that while his original appeal was pending at the Supreme Court, Adams filed a motion with the Seventh District Court of Appeals to reopen the appeal of his conviction based on a claim of ineffective assistance of appellate counsel. The Seventh District denied the request, and he appealed to the Supreme Court, which because of the claim was mandated to hear his case.

    Adams Challenges Autopsy Report’s Admission
    Adams claimed his appellate attorneys were ineffective because they failed to challenge errors made by his trial counsel.

    He claimed his rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment were violated when Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk testified as the state’s expert witness on the results of Tenney’s autopsy. Germaniuk was a substitute witness in place of the coroner who performed the autopsy, and Adams asserted the state violated the “confrontation clause” of the Sixth Amendment because he did not have the ability to confront and challenge the testimony of the coroner. He argued his appellate counsel was ineffective because they didn’t object to admitting the coroner’s report without having the original doctor present.

    The Court explained that at the time Adams filed his objections, the law surrounding the admissibility of autopsy reports prepared by medical examiners not testifying in the case was unsettled. Subsequently, the Court in its 2014 State v. Maxwell decision determined an autopsy report was a “business record” and could be admitted as evidence in a case even if the report’s author was not available to be confronted.

    That ruling not only cleared the way for the report to be admitted, but also allowed Germaniuk as an expert witness to testify on the contents of it and offer his own opinions, the Court stated. And because Germaniuk was available, he was able to be confronted by Adams’ attorneys at trial. The Court stated since it was permissible for the report and Germaniuk’s testimony to be admitted, an objection to it by his appellate attorneys would have failed. The Court concluded the appellate attorneys could not be deemed ineffective for not raising the issue on appeal.

    Errors by Trial Counsel Alleged
    Adams identified six objections that his trial attorneys should have raised. Because his appellate attorneys did not claim those mistakes were made, he maintained his appellate counsel provided ineffective assistance.

    During the trial, a friend of Tenney’s was to testify about her fear of Adams, and the trial judge decide that he, rather than the attorneys, would question the witness. In his first direct appeal of his conviction, Adams claimed the judge interjected himself into the proceedings in a way that was overly favorable to the state. Adams argued his appellate attorneys failed to raise that argument in his appeal.

    The Court noted that while Adams’ appellate counsel did not raise it, the Court on its own considered the issue when it heard his appeal, and it rejected the argument.

    Adams also faults his trial counsel for failing to object to statements made by Detective William Blanchard, including that Blanchard mentioned the name of a victim of Adams in an unrelated rape. Blanchard only stated the name and did not indicate she was a rape victim. Adams’ trial counsel objected to Blanchard’s statements and sought a mistrial, which the trial court denied, and the Supreme Court affirmed the denial on appeal.

    While Adams’ appellate attorneys may not have raised the issue, the Court addressed it during the appeal, and concluded that appellate counsel was not ineffective for not raising an issue the Court already addressed.

    The Court also rejected Adams’ contention that the trial court never stated its findings of facts on the record, but the Court stated that Adams did not explain how that prejudiced his case. He also objected to his trial attorneys’ failure to remove two prospective jurors, which the Court noted it addressed and rejected during his direct appeal.

    Additionally, he argued that the evidence against him was insufficient to convict him of aggravated murder in the course of committing a rape or kidnapping. He claimed his appellate counsel did not challenge the sufficiency of evidence during his direct appeal.

    The Court disagreed, writing that the matter was considered during his direct appeal.

    “Notwithstanding the lack of a proposition of law on the issue, we addressed the sufficiency of evidence on direct appeal in the context of reviewing the aggravating circumstance and found sufficient evident to prove that Adams committed aggravated murder in the course of rape and kidnapping,” the Court stated.

    According to Mahoning County Common Pleas Court records, Adams is scheduled to be resentenced in June.

    Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor and Justices Paul E. Pfeifer, Terrence O’Donnell, Judith Ann Lanzinger, Sharon L. Kennedy, and Judith L. French joined the opinion.

    Justice William M. O’Neill dissented without an opinion.

    2012-1274. State v. Adams, Slip Opinion No. 2016-Ohio-3043.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •