Medical Information for Law Librarians
Sometimes, it can save a life
It was a Matlock moment: the February 18, 2004, acquittal of Alan Gell in rural Bertie County, North Carolina. Gell had spent the last nine years on death row for the murder of Allen Ray Jenkins, who was found dead in his house of a gunshot wound on April 14, 1995.
Gell’s girlfriend, fifteen-year-old Shanna Hall, told police that she and Gell, along with another girl named Crystal Morris, had committed a robbery that got out of hand. In exchange for their testimony, Hall and Morris were not charged. Gell wasn’t so lucky. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on March 3, 1998.
Two people thought Gell was innocent. One was Gell himself. The other was Jim Cooney, a high-profile attorney who got Gell a new trial, established that prosecutors had withheld evidence, and secured Gell’s freedom.
In particular, Cooney proved that the date assigned to Jenkins’s death, April 3, was wrong due to the condition of Jenkins’s body, which wasn’t decomposed enough. The actual date, according to new forensic evidence, was more like April 8 or 9, which gave Gell an adamantine alibi: He was already in jail for stealing a car.
In 2004, I was the librarian at Jim Cooney’s law firm. I remember this case. Cooney used medical textbooks and had an…
