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Allan Gell
- Former
Death-Row Inmate Speaks About Freedom, Rebuilding Life After
Acquittal
Alan Gell Free
Man After 9 Years In Prison, 2 Murder Trials
February 23, 2004
LEWISTON, N.C. -- After nine
years in prison and two murder trials, Alan Gell is a free man.
A jury cleared Gell of all
charges in a 1995 murder last week.
Those nine years in prison
shaped Gell's future. He talked with WRAL's Mike Charbonneau
about his new-found freedom.
"It's great to be home,"
Gell said. "But it's an adjustment."
Gell and his family waited
nearly a decade to celebrate his homecoming. For the past nine
years, Jeanette Johnson visted her son every Saturday at Raleigh's
Central Prison.
"I'd sit there and talk
to him and tell him I love him, and he'd tell me not to worry,"
Johnson said, "that he'd put it in God's hand, and God wasn't
going to let him die for something he didn't do."
Gell was sentenced to die for
the 1995 murder of a Bertie County man. But last week, the jury
in his second trial acquitted him of all charges, and Gell walked
out of court a free man.
"God and lawyers and fate
and everything would let the truth come out," Gell said.
Gell said he is not bitter
about how long it took to be set free. But he said he wants investigators
to find Alan Jenkins' real killer.
"I think they (Jenkins'
family) need to know who took their loved one," Gell said,
"and I think I need to know who took their loved one because
I did nine years for them."
Most of that time was spent
on Death Row.
"I had a lot of friends
be executed that I had met there," Gell said.
Jenkins' family offered a statement,
saying they "did not agree with the way the system worked
this time."
Attorney General Roy Cooper
declared the case closed.
Gell said he plans to stay
in Lewiston for a while, catching up with family and friends.
But then he wants to head off to school, become a social worker
and help troubled teens.
He also plans to use his case
to fight for a moratorium on the death penalty.
"My whole outlook on it
is to give it a purpose," he said, "give it a reason."
Gell said helping make a difference
is the only way to ensure the last nine years of his life were
not wasted.
Man taken off death
row, found not guilty
CNN, Wednesday, February
18, 2004
WINDSOR, North Carolina (AP)
-- 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.
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. After
the verdict, Gell hugged his attorneys and his mother wept in
the courtroom.
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."
The case has led to calls for
North Carolina to impose a moratorium on executions, and the
verdict likely will fuel the debate.
Prosecutors who handled Gell's
retrial were not seeking the death penalty, but Gell faced an
automatic life term if convicted. Prosecutors left court without
comment.
Attorney General Roy Cooper
released a statement saying he was "confident that a thorough
presentation of the evidence was made" by both sides.
"The jury has spoken and
we respect its decision," Cooper said.
Asked whether he harbors 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 pull the trigger and 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 years old, did not answer when
her boyfriend asked her twice whether Gell killed Jenkins. She
also told her boyfriend 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 April 14.
During the retrial, three scientific
experts testified that Jenkins' body and the scene of his killing
were not consistent with the prosecution's argument that he was
killed 11 days prior.
Defense lawyer Joseph Cheshire
V said the case shows why defense lawyers need open access to
prosecution files and investigations of withheld evidence.
"A prosecutor wins when
justice is done, not when there's a conviction," he said.
Charles Jenkins, the older
brother of the murder victim, said watching Gell go free was
"hard on everybody." His wife, Maxine Jenkins, remained
convinced of Gell's guilt.
"The bottom line is, we
know who pulled the trigger," she said.
Investigators found no physical
evidence such as hair, blood, fingerprints or fibers linking
Gell to Jenkins' death. Police found the shotgun and other items
in July 1995 after Morris and Hall told them where they had been
hidden.
Both Hall and Morris reached
plea bargains with prosecutors in which they promised to testify
truthfully in return for being allowed to plead guilty to second-degree
murder and receive sentences of nearly 10 years in prison.
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.
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.
The state Senate approved a
death penalty moratorium bill last year, but the bill was never
taken up by the state House.
Copyright 2004 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved.
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
