43
Murder case judge to screen hearsay
Photo
Bennie Adams
The capital murder trial in the 23-year-old case is to begin Oct. 6.
YOUNGSTOWN — Gina Tenney expressed her fear of her neighbor, Bennie L. Adams, to others before her Dec. 29, 1985, strangulation, allegedly at the hands of Adams.
Martin P. Desmond, assistant Mahoning County prosecutor, wants testimony concerning her statements admitted in Adams’ trial.
Adams, 51, of Hollywood Avenue, is charged with aggravated murder with a death-penalty specification in the death of Tenney, a 19-year-old Youngstown State University student who was Adams’ upstairs neighbor in an Ohio Avenue duplex.
Tenney’s body was found floating in the Mahoning River near West Avenue on Dec. 30, 1985. Adams, whose trial is to begin Oct. 6, was indicted last fall after a DNA match was found in evidence police had preserved for 22 years.
In a pretrial hearing Friday, Judge Timothy E. Franken of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court said he would screen those statements for admissibility when the people who say they heard and remember Tenney’s comments in the last several weeks of her life testify in a 9 a.m. Sept. 19 hearing.
Adams made several telephone calls to Tenney, after which she would immediately contact her parents or a male friend to express her fear of Adams, whose actions caused her to change her telephone number and install additional apartment door locks, according to Desmond’s motion to allow hearsay testimony concerning Tenney’s “excited utterances.”
With limited exceptions, hearsay is inadmissible in court. Excited utterances are among the exceptions.
“In talking to these witnesses, do I think there is going to be a specific quote? No,” Desmond told the judge Friday. He added, however, “She talked often about being afraid of Bennie Adams.”
Franken also will consider a defense motion filed Friday to exclude from evidence Tenney’s ATM card, which police said they found Dec. 30, 1985, in Adams’ jacket, which was lying on his apartment floor. In that motion, defense lawyers Louis M. DeFabio and Anthony P. Meranto said that item came from an illegal warrantless search.
Adams wasn’t prosecuted at that time for having Tenney’s ATM card, but his probation in an unrelated theft case was revoked based on the arrest.
The defense also seeks to exclude from evidence Adams’ 1986 conviction for the aggravated robbery, kidnapping and rape of a Boardman woman, saying it would be irrelevant and prejudicial to the jury.
Desmond filed a motion seeking to have that prior conviction admitted because he said it illustrates a pattern of behavior similar to what is alleged in the Tenney case. Adams served 18 years in prison for his crimes against the Boardman woman.
As of Friday, court Administrator Robert Regula said the court had received only 19 completed questionnaires from potential jurors for Adams’ murder trial out of 325 mailed out Aug. 28. Nonrespondents will get a follow-up letter, he said.
milliken@vindy.com