43
Judges find delay significant
YOUNGSTOWN
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.