43
Top court declines two murder cases
YOUNGSTOWN
The Ohio Supreme Court has refused a request by the prosecutor for reconsideration in one decades-old Mahoning County murder case that was reopened by testing of long-preserved evidence, and it has refused to hear an appeal by the defense in another such case.
The state’s top court refused the prosecution’s request for reconsideration of its decision that removed the death sentence of Bennie Adams, who was convicted in the 1985 aggravated murder of Gina Tenney, a 19-year-old Youngstown State University student, who was his neighbor on Youngstown’s North Side.
A muskrat trapper found Tenney’s body floating in the Mahoning River in December 1985.
The coroner ruled she had been raped, tied up, smothered and strangled and was dead before being dumped in the water.
Adams, 58, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2008 after testing of DNA that was preserved for more than two decades linked him to Tenney’s death.
Ralph Rivera, an assistant Mahoning County prosecutor, said he hadn’t decided whether to appeal the Ohio Supreme Court decision in the Adams case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If Rivera doesn’t file that appeal, Judge Lou A. D’Apolito of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court will resentence Adams to 20 years to life in prison, which would be the only available sentence based on the law that was in effect in 1985.
In the other case, the state’s top court refused to hear a defense appeal of a 7th District Court of Appeals decision upholding the conviction of James P. Ferrara in a December 1974 Canfield triple murder.
In 2013, Ferrara, now 67, was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive life prison terms in the shooting deaths of Benjamin Marsh, 33, and his wife, Marilyn, 32, and in the beating death of their 4-year-old daughter, Heather, in their South Turner Road home.
Their 1-year-old son, Christopher, was found nearly a day later. He suffered a concussion and survived.
The Marsh case was re-opened in 2009, when the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation matched three fingerprints found on the Marshes’ garage door to those it had on file from Ferrara.