Top court affirms Adams’ murder conviction

Staff report

COLUMBUS

The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed the aggravated-murder conviction of a Youngstown man, whose death sentence it had earlier vacated.

The Supreme Court voted 6-1 Thursday, with Justice William M. O’Neill dissenting, to uphold the conviction of Bennie Adams for the 1985 murder of Youngstown State University student Gina Tenney.

Last fall, the Supreme Court returned Adams’ case to Mahoning County Common Pleas Court for a new sentencing hearing, noting that the state is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution’s double jeopardy clause from again seeking the death penalty.

In that decision, it had also affirmed Adams’ aggravated- murder conviction, but not a related aggravated-burglary element, thereby taking Adams’ death sentence off the table.

In its decision, the state’s high court explained that, while his original appeal was pending at the Supreme Court, Adams filed a motion with the 7th District Court of Appeals to reopen the appeal of his conviction based on a claim of ineffective assistance of his appeals counsel.

The 7th District Court denied the request, and he appealed to the Supreme Court, which, because of the claim, was mandated to hear his case.

Adams, 58, is now in Mahoning County jail, awaiting resentencing at 10:30 a.m. June 6 by Judge Lou A. D’Apolito of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. The only available sentence is 20 years to life in prison based on the law that was in effect in 1985.

A jury convicted Adams in 2008 after testing of DNA that was preserved for more than two decades linked him to the murder of Tenney, 19, who was Adams’ North Side neighbor.

Adams was sentenced to death in October 2008 by Judge D’Apolito’s predecessor, Judge Timothy E. Franken.

A muskrat trapper found Tenney’s lifeless 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.