Windsor, North Carolina (AP, February 18) - A prisoner taken off death row after a judge ruled prosecutors withheld key evidence in his murder trial was found not guilty Wednesday in a second trial.Gell obtained a new trial when it was revealed that prosecutors had concealed exculpatory evidence. The case was mostly based on the testimony of two teenagers that they had seen Gell kill Jenkins on April 3, 1995. But in a taped phone call with her boyfriend, one of the witnesses refused twice to answer when he asked if Gell actually did it but did tell him she had to "make up a story" about how Jenkins died. Prosecutors knew this but didn't tell the defense.
Alan Gell, 28, has spent a decade behind bars in the 1995 murder of retired truck driver Allen Ray Jenkins, who was shot twice during a robbery. ...
He was immediately allowed to go free. When asked what he was going to do, he responded: "Go home, where I should have been years ago."
In addition, prosecutors concealed statements from more than a dozen witnesses that they saw Jenkins alive after April 3. Gell was either out of state or in jail on a car-theft charge from April 4 until after Jenkins' body was found April 14. That is, they knew he had a solid alibi but hid the fact and still went after him.
Gell's acquittal came less than two weeks after Darryl Hunt was cleared of all charges in a 1984 rape and killing in Winston-Salem. Hunt, who was found guilty of the murder of Deborah Sykes at two jury trials, was freed in December after a DNA test pinned the crime on another man, who has since confessed.In what can be hoped to be dramatic understatement, the AP notes that
On that same day, February 6, the state Supreme Court overturned two death sentences, ordering a new trial in one case and a new sentencing in the other.
[t]he case has led to calls for North Carolina to impose a moratorium on executions, and the verdict likely will fuel the debate.At least.
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