North Carolina’s Attorney General has announced that the state will retry Alan Gell, whose death sentence was vacated last year when a North Carolina judge ruled that prosecutors withheld important evidence that might have exonerated Gell at his 1998 trial. After acknowledging that prosecutors from his office violated court orders and the U.S. Constitution by not handing over the evidence, Attorney General Ray Copper announced that the state will not seek the death penalty at Gell’s second trial. The accusations that prosecutors withheld evidence and created false testimony could lead to an investigation by the North Carolina Bar, which can suspend or revoke law licenses for misconduct. Among the evidence not revealed was a secretly taped 1995 telephone conversation in which the prosecution’s star witness said she “had to make up a story” about the murder. The state also withheld numerous statements of eyewitnesses who said they saw the victim alive after the only time Gell could have committed the murder.

(News & Observer, June 4, 2003). See Innocence.