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Death-penalty appeal begins Monday
YOUNGSTOWN
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.