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Police say a city couple spent weeks carrying out an elaborate plot to frame a man for crimes he didn't commit - until they were undone by their ringing cellphones. Michael Dale Timmons, 39, and Teresa Sandra Knapp, 46, of Henrietta Street, reported to police the man had raped Knapp and broken into their home, among other crimes, city police Detective William Olson said.

Alan Gell had a history of bad behavior. By 1995, the 21-year-old North Carolinian had already been in trouble for drug offenses and car theft. But when Allen Ray Jenkins, a retired trucker, turned up dead that year with two shotgun blasts to the chest, authorities charged Gell with something far worse: first-degree murder. Gell spent the next nine years in prison - four of them on death row for the killing in Aulander, a town 120 miles east of Raleigh. There was just one problem. Gell never actually committed the crime.

North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation and its insurers have agreed to pay $12.475 million to two innocent men who spent a total of 31 years behind bars. The state agreed to pay $7.85 million to settle the state lawsuit filed by Floyd Brown, a mentally disabled man locked up for 14 years in a psychiatric hospital based on what his lawyers said was a false confession created out of whole cloth by an SBI agent. Brown has also reached a separate settlement with Anson County, whose sheriff's deputies helped investigate the case. A federal judge has sealed the Anson County settlement; North Carolina law requires that all such court settlements be public records.