From Death Row to Freedom

A prisoner taken off death row after a judge ruled that prosecutors withheld key evidence in his murder trial was found not guilty Wednesday in a second trial.

Alan Gell, 28, had been imprisoned since he was convicted in the 1995 slaying of retired truck driver Allen Ray Jenkins, who was shot twice during a robbery. After the verdict, Gell hugged his lawyers, and his mother wept.

He was immediately freed. When asked what he was going to do, he responded: “Go home, where I should have been years ago.”

Later, at the Lewiston home of his mother and stepfather, he said: “I’m actually kind of confused. I had long-term plans, but I didn’t have short-term plans.”

The case has led to calls for North Carolina to impose a moratorium on executions, and the verdict is likely to fuel the debate.

Prosecutors who handled Gell’s retrial were not seeking the death penalty, but he faced an automatic life term if convicted.

Prosecutors left court without comment.

Atty. Gen. Roy Cooper released a statement saying he was “confident that a thorough presentation of the evidence was made” by both sides.

Asked whether he harbored hard feelings against the state, Gell replied, “No comment. As you all know, there was some misconduct.”

Jenkins’ body was found on April 14, 1995, inside his home in Aulander. Prosecutors built a case against Gell based on the testimony of two teenagers, Crystal Morris and Shanna Hall, Gell’s former girlfriend, who testified that they saw Gell kill Jenkins during a robbery on April 3, 1995.

But prosecutors in Gell’s original trial withheld from defense lawyers a secretly taped phone call in which Morris, who was then 15, did not answer when her boyfriend asked her twice whether Gell had killed Jenkins. She told her boyfriend that she had to “make up a story” about Jenkins’ death.

Also withheld by prosecutors were statements from more than a dozen witnesses who said 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 on April 14.

During the retrial, three scientific experts testified that Jenkins’ body and the scene of his death were not consistent with the prosecution’s argument that he had been killed 11 days before his body was found.