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Murderer facing 20 years to life
The prosecution will seek maximum consecutive sentences for the murderer.
YOUNGSTOWN — Sentencing will be at 10 a.m. today for James A. Hall, who was convicted of aggravated murder with a gun specification in the death of Jeffrey A. Queen.
After just two hours of deliberations, a seven-woman, five-man jury returned its verdicts Thursday afternoon, also convicting Hall of being a convicted felon with a gun.
Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, who presided over the four-day trial, will rule on the repeat-violent-offender specification against Hall at today’s sentencing hearing.
Hall, 30, of Victoria Street, is facing 20 years to life in prison for the aggravated murder, a mandatory consecutive three years for the gun specification, one to five years for being a felon with a gun, and one to 10 years for the repeat-violent-offender specification.
Robert E. Bush Jr., chief of the criminal division in the Mahoning County prosecutor’s office, said he’d ask for maximum consecutive sentences. “It was a well-prosecuted circumstantial case,” said Bush, who prosecuted the case with J. Michael Thompson, assistant county prosecutor.
“All the evidence we put on continued to point to the defendant,” Bush said, citing the timing of telephone calls between the defendant and victim, gunshot residue found on the inside of the driver’s side door of Hall’s car, and a leaf and stem fragment police found in Hall’s car that matched the Japanese honeysuckle vines where Queen’s body was found.
“It was a circumstantial case, but they had a lot of circumstances,” Hall’s lawyer, Thomas E. Zena said of the prosecution’s case. Zena said, however, that an appeal will be filed on Hall’s behalf.
Queen, 35, of Austintown, a confidential informant who had made undercover drug buys from Hall for police, was shot three times in the torso with a .38-caliber gun at 12:30 a.m. Oct. 14, 2006.
Queen was to testify against Hall in a federal drug trafficking case. Two days after a pre-trial hearing in the drug case, Hall picked Queen up at Queen’s Lanterman Road residence in Hall’s car and fatally shot him a few minutes later about a half-mile away off Riblett Road.
A witness discovered Queen’s body in the woods in the 4000 block of Riblett Road eight hours later.
Hall pleaded guilty Nov. 7 to the federal crack cocaine trafficking charges, for which he awaits sentencing in June. The sentencing range in the federal case is from five years to life in prison.
Hall was sentenced to five to 25 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and felonious assault in a May 1995 shooting that killed Arthur Tarver and critically wounded Larry J. Hargrave. Hall and both victims were then 17.
The repeat-violent-offender specification cites that conviction, which occurred after Hall was bound over from juvenile court for trial as an adult. Tarver died from bullet wounds to his neck and chest. Hargrave survived 13 gunshot wounds.
milliken@vindy.com