Setting aside, if that's possible, the horror of having required someone to spend years on death row for a crime that by all indications he didn't commit, the outcome of the Alan Gell story makes us feel good all over. Well, most of us.

The prosecutors, they're hating it. Nor is the family of Allen Ray Jenkins, involuntarily deceased, all that thrilled.

Who can blame them, whether prosecutors or the murder victim's kin? Twice the state attorney general's office laid it on the line: Gell was the one, they charged, whose shotgun blasts had killed Jenkins over there in Aulander, Bertie County, back in 1995.

The first time a jury agreed. But then it turned out that crucial evidence favorable to Gell had not been shared with his defense. It was the prosecution's duty to share it. A new trial was granted, and the second jury could almost be heard guffawing over the lameness of the state's case.

Before the day was out, Gell was chilling on the couch back at his momma's place. Maybe now he'll forswear the dirt-bag lifestyle that landed him in such trouble; how grand it would be to see him follow through with his plans to get a degree in sociology and work for justice reform.

Grander still, though, if in the meantime Jenkins' true killer could be positively identified.

It shouldn't tarnish Gell in any way to remind ourselves that he was acquitted and freed without the murder being definitively pinned on someone else. His attorneys construe the evidence as having proved his innocence, and there's a strong argument to be made in that vein. Forensic scientists testified that Jenkins simply couldn't have been killed on the day Gell was alleged by the state to have done it. He had ironclad alibis for the days after that. In the end the state had nothing on him but the shaky testimony of two young women who admitted to their own involvement in the slaying.

But a verdict of not guilty -- i.e., not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt -- cannot by itself completely dispel the terrible cloud that has shadowed Gell all these years. The prosecutors may respect the jury's decision, as Attorney General Roy Cooper commented. But that's not the same as acknowledging for the record that they're now convinced Gell had nothing to do with the murder, and vowing to bring the actual killer to justice.

With the state still acting as though it thinks Gell and his crackerjack lawyers simply fooled the jury, no wonder Jenkins' family is having trouble reconciling itself to Gell on the loose.

Was Gell himself victimized by prosecutors so intent on winning their case that they stooped to cheating? Victimized, yes. But the circumstances of the prosecutorial misconduct have yet to be explained. It was grievous. Was it deliberate? Somebody needs to make a determined effort to find out.

If overreaching by prosecutors weren't an issue, it's doubtful that state Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake Jr. would have felt the need to set up a commission examining how people who are in fact innocent sometimes wind up in prison. Lake's Supreme Court would not recently have overturned a death sentence in one case and a murder conviction plus death sentence in another while chiding prosecutors for what amounted to unfair closing arguments. And Darryl Hunt might not have spent 19 years behind bars for a Winston-Salem murder and rape to which someone else now has confessed.

But maybe this is the time to say: Let's remember what our prosecutors are up against. It's not simple to balance the aggressive crime-fighting everybody seems to expect from them with a due regard for the rights of people who might be as innocent as little lambs -- and who probably are going to claim they're innocent even if they're guilty as the devil.

Our adversarial system of criminal justice is designed to sort out the conflicting claims and confusing evidence. What deters abuse by prosecutors -- as they wield the full power of the state -- is the integrity, discipline and training to resist the notion that, with a conviction in the balance, the end justifies the means.

Fair play can be undermined by the political climate in which prosecutors, answerable directly or indirectly to voters, most operate. Or by competitive zeal grown unhealthily intense. Or by an illusion of righteous infallibility. Let a bad guy walk? Don't think so.

A ton of respect is due those public servants who act in our behalf to secure the punishment of lawbreakers. And that respect is magnified by the professional standards they are obliged to uphold. They are officers of the court, in pursuit of justice and the truth, not simply of another hide to nail to the wall.

At least, that's our civic ideal -- an ideal hard to sustain if the evidence that finally brought Alan Gell his freedom had been withheld on purpose and with full awareness of its significance. On that score, those who have charge of quality control within our justice system owe us an answer. Anyone who acted in bad faith needs to pay. For not only was Gell wrongly convicted, but it will now be far harder ever to determine who really killed Allen Ray Jenkins -- twice the shame.

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