Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Appearances
Up First from NPR
The Luckiest of the Unlucky
I talked to her, and she told me it was simply agonizing.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Well, my story aired on NPR and was published in The Atlantic, and I thought naively that the attention would create kind of enough outrage that Ben might be freed. But you know what? Nothing happened, right? A radio or magazine story doesn't have any weight in a court of law. And so it was interesting, just like Jim McCluskey. Now I was haunted by Ben's story.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
So I decided to write a book with absolutely no prospect of Ben's release. But then something finally went right for Ben Spencer. A new district attorney for Dallas County was elected in November of 2018. His name is John Crizzo. He's a And so Ben's legal team approached Crusoe and suggested that they wanted to try basically a new legal strategy.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Rather than trying to get Ben declared innocent, which had failed before, they wanted to prove that he didn't get a fair trial. And that is a much, much easier standard. So Crusoe agreed to assign one of his prosecutors, a woman named Cynthia Garza, to dig into the new evidence that Daryl and I had uncovered. And this prosecutor discovered even more evidence suggesting that Ben was innocent.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, people keep finding holes and Cynthia Garza discovered yet another hole. So as a prosecutor, she had access to all the police and prosecutor's files over the years, which, you know, journalists and defense attorneys don't have.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
So when she went through the files, she found that not only had Gladys Oliver taken money from Crimestoppers — that's the reason the original conviction was vacated, if you'll recall — But she also received $5,000 to $10,000 from Ross Perot and lied about that too. This is how John Curzo put it.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And so finally, finally, finally, after all of these years, the district attorney said this man should be released. So on March 12, 2021... Ben Spencer walked out of his cell. He met up with Deborah, and the two of them walked into the main lobby of the jail. For some reason, the guards had allowed more than 200 people into the lobby of the jail. That never happens.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
So in 1993, he asked Deborah to divorce him so that she could move on with her life. And after a couple of years of resisting, she did. Ben said she finally agreed.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And they were cheering and high-fiving, and they went crazy when they saw Ben, right? It was this incredible scene. It was like a Disney movie, right? And then Ben and Deborah, they stopped, and then they looked at this crowd, and then they began to slowly thread their way through the crowd as if the seas parted.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Oh, my goodness. To be clear, like, this was a conditional release because at any moment, Ben could be sent back to prison for life. It all hinged on the same high court that had denied him in the past, the Court of Criminal Appeals. And this court... These appellate judges, they're all Republicans. Most of them are former prosecutors, and they waited another three years to make their decision.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
But even with this Damocles sword hanging over Ben, he did his best to kind of move on with his life. He got a job from a man who believed he was innocent. He made up for lost time with his son who was, get this, 34 years old at that point. But the happiest thing he did was to remarry Deborah in January of 2022. Wow.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
I know. I know. She had been his most loyal friend, supporter all this time. So I went to the wedding, Aisha. It was in the middle of COVID. But about 500 people came to the ceremony. Everyone masked, right? And it was held in Deborah's church, her Baptist church. And one scene is really etched in my mind. So I was standing at the back of the sanctuary and I was looking at the altar.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And Ben was in the tux and Deb was in a traditional white gown. And standing at the altar were five men, including Ben, who had spent years in prison. Ben knew them from prison. Of those five men, four of them had been wrongly convicted.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
More than 100 years. In total, more than 100 years had been stolen from them and 30 from Ben. So finally, in May of this year, the Court of Criminal Appeals issued its ruling. And for the first time, it ruled in Ben Spencer's favor. It agreed that he had not received a fair trial. But it didn't exonerate him. It didn't clear him of the crime.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
That decision was left to the district attorney, John Crizzo. And Crizzo set a hearing to announce his decision on August 29th of this year. And I was there, along with Jim McCluskey. And crowded into the courtroom to learn what Ben's fate was going to be. This was actually the same courtroom where Ben had been sentenced to life in prison 37 years earlier. Ben was at the front of the room.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
He's 6'4". graying hair in his charcoal pinstripe suit and light gray tie. And Cynthia Garza stood up first. She's a prosecutor who had gone through all the case files and found the newest evidence. And she said that the state was dismissing the charges based on innocence.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And then her voice cracked when she said this, quote, I want to apologize to you for this grave injustice that was had upon you.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And she walked over to Ben and they hugged and they were both crying. And then the judge did something really unusual. She came down from the bench and she stood in front of Ben. And she said, Mr. Spencer, I want to be the first one to shake the hand of this individual that is now found innocent. Congratulations.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah, well, so here's how he used his time. He stood up and he reminded everyone that he and his family were not the only victims of the justice system.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Well, it's complicated. And first, let me just say that Ben Spencer did receive compensation for the injustice. But, of course, he lost arguably the best years of his life, ages 22 to 56. The good news is the criminal justice system is getting better in some states. There's more understanding of the flaws, and some states are changing the law to prevent wrongful convictions. For example, Texas.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
I mean, Texas has severely limited the use of jailhouse informants, and prosecutors have to turn over all their evidence to the defense. I mean, Texas actually has become the model in the country, and it's done this for a couple of reasons. First, it turns out that a lot of people have been wrongly convicted in Texas and later cleared.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, despite the divorce, Deborah remained his most loyal and faithful friend. And, you know, they stayed in touch.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Also, Texas still executes people, and it would look really bad to execute an innocent man. But the bad news is, getting an innocent person out of prison still requires dumb luck. Ben Spencer is the luckiest of the unlucky. But, you know, at the end of the day, Aisha, I'm kind of left with this question. In America, should a person's freedom depend on luck?
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Well, not really. I mean, he had friends, but one by one, they were paroled or exonerated. And he had his faith, but there wasn't actually very much good happening in his life. That is, not until May 20, 2001, when he gets a visitor, Jim McCluskey at Centurion Ministries.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
As I said, Ben had started writing to this ministry in 1989, but until this day, no one had actually come to talk to him in person. And Jim left the prison convinced that Ben was innocent. If you remember, this is how I put it.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Jim goes to work, right? Boots on the ground. He and another investigator began interviewing anyone even remotely connected to the case. 200 people, actually, about 200 people. And Jim's goal was just to persuade a judge to consider new evidence in what's called an evidentiary hearing. And guess what, Aisha?
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
He does indeed find new evidence that shows how flawed the investigation was and how flawed the trial was. Okay, so tell me more about that. Yeah. So first, there is a forensic visual scientist. Now, that's a guy who's an expert on what people are... physically able to see in different lighting conditions.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And he showed that Gladys Oliver and the two teenagers could not possibly physically identified anyone that night from so far away. And then second, the jailhouse informant. So at trial, Danny Edwards, the informant, had said that he never received a deal in exchange for his testimony. In fact, he told the jury that he testified out of moral outrage at Ben's alleged crime.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
But Jim McCluskey found evidence that the informant had received a deal to dramatically reduce his sentence. He was facing 25 years. He walked out after 14 months. Mm-hmm. But then Jim found something else. He found that police had ignored a far more likely suspect, one that they actually knew about way back in 1987 before either of Ben's trials.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Remember, Aisha, I told you about tunnel vision, and that's when police or prosecutors have a suspect, and that kind of closes their minds to other options. Well, here's your example.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah. Yeah, his name is Michael Hubbard, and during his reinvestigation, Jim McCluskey talked to two of Hubbard's friends, and they told him that Hubbard had confessed to robbing and killing Jeffrey Young. He described the entire assault. In fact, in the 1990s, Harper used a strikingly similar M.O. to attack other victims.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
He would wait outside of the office for these businessmen to come out on weekends or on nights. He would hit them over the head with a bat, steal the cash and jewelry. In fact, he was actually called the Batman. And Hubbard eventually landed in prison for those later attacks. He attacked 10 men. And he got a life sentence. And he's still in prison.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And so Jim gathered all of this evidence and presented it to a Dallas judge.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah, you know, and it's a really fascinating story. I've never heard of this happening before. Jim delivered the evidence to Rick Magnus, who had just been elected judge in Dallas County. And Magnus began to read the documents, and he actually shut down his courtroom for a week just to immerse himself in the case. And then in 2007...
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
A few months later, he called a hearing, and Judge Magnus essentially relitigated the case. He questioned the police. He grilled the witnesses. He also brought Michael Hubbard to court, and Hubbard actually claimed the fifth. Judge Magnus goes back, considers it, and the next year, in 2008, he arrived at a really surprising conclusion, one that he told me about a decade later.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
So Judge Magnus felt that Ben was basically caught in a trap.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
That's right. This is not a Hollywood ending, at least not at this point. So in Texas, a judge can't just release a prisoner if he believes he's innocent. It requires the approval of the high court in Texas called the Court of Criminal Appeals. So Ben had to wait in prison for three years. for his decision. And then in 2011, the Court of Criminal Appeals made their ruling.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
They said, no, you know what? We don't agree. There's no DNA in this case. Sorry, Ben. You're going to have to spend the rest of your life in prison.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
You know, the problem is that in Texas, they have a very high standard to reverse a conviction and declare someone innocent. They actually call it a Herculean burden. And essentially what they need is brand new, indisputable evidence, like DNA evidence or maybe videotape that shows up that clearly shows that this person wasn't the perpetrator, but this other person was.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And none of that existed in Ben's case. After the high court's rejection, everyone fighting for Ben's freedom was simply devastated. And when I interviewed Ben, it's not really something he wanted to talk about. It was just too painful for him.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah, I mean, basically, I was trying to tell the story of how broken the system is. I think people didn't realize that even if a judge declared a person innocent, he can't get out of prison. I mean, how crazy is that? But, you know, Aisha, I had this crazy hope of finding new evidence. So I went to Dallas and I teamed up with Daryl Parker.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
He's that former police officer we heard earlier who became a private investigator. I teamed up with him.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, we had to provide new evidence, not just the evidence. Jim's evidence didn't even count anymore. We needed to find something new. But, you know, Daryl and I spent weeks knocking on doors all over Dallas. And... I got to tell you, I was amazed at what we found 30 years after the crime.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
That's right, Aisha. And on top of this, in the 1990s, Ben suffered a lot of personal losses. I mean, think about it. He lost his freedom. He lost his future. He lost his family. When Ben was arrested, his wife was seven months pregnant. So he lost the chance to raise his son. But for him, the worst thing was the toll that his life sentence took on his wife, Deborah.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Now, you'll remember I said Ben had an alibi, a friend he was with, but no one believed her. Well, Daryl and I ended up tracking down her younger brother, who said he was with both of them at the time of the assault, but he had never been questioned. So that's new evidence. Mm-hmm. We eventually found one of the original three eyewitnesses. Another wouldn't talk to us, and the third was dead.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And this guy's name is Jimmy Cotton, and he was one of the teenage boys that Gladys Oliver directed the police to, if you'll recall. Daryl and I found him at his mother's apartment.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Hi, I'm Barb. Nice to meet you. Jimmy was tall. He was real thin. He had served time in prison. Now he was in his late 40s. And he told me that he felt a lot of pressure from the authorities, from the police, to identify Ben Spencer in 1987.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And he said something else. Jimmy said that he also felt pressure from Gladys Oliver because she wanted to get the $25,000 reward money.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
Yeah, that's how everybody knows there's a reward there. So before we left, Jimmy said he felt really terrible, really awful about helping a man, helping put a man in prison for a crime he didn't do. And later he signed an affidavit and he took a polygraph in which he said he had not seen Ben Spencer's that night and that Gladys Oliver had pressured him.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
And he passed the polygraph with flying colors. Now, you know, Aisha, I've been a journalist for more than 40 years by now. I'm showing my age. But I learned two new things when Daryl and I began hunting for evidence. And the first is kind of a basic rule of investigating and journalism and, frankly, life, which is just show up. You'll never know what you'll find.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
The second is that time, yeah, it may be the enemy of truth, but it's also its friend. Okay, so, sure, evidence disappears, memories fade, witnesses die. But also, you know, alliances change, marriages collapse. People's consciences begin to eat away at them. You know, a person no longer has a reason to lie. That's what we found with Jimmy Cotton and also with Danny Edwards.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
He was a jailhouse informant because, remember, he was one who said that Ben Spencer had confessed to him while he and Spencer shared a jail cell. Edwards got out essentially two months after he testified at trial.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
That's right. Exactly. He was morally outraged. Yeah. So we found him. Daryl and I found him, and he was living at a halfway house. Danny had spent about half his life in prison by that point, and time had changed him, and also the circumstances had changed, right? The statute of limitations for perjury in Ben Spencer's case had passed. It was only five years. It had been 30 years at this point.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
So Danny could speak to us without worrying about being arrested or without any consequences. And what he told Daryl and me is that Ben never confessed to him.
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The Luckiest of the Unlucky
So now, you know, Ben Spencer's been in prison for 30 years. I thought he was out. No, he's in for life.
Up First from NPR
The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Well, Aisha, this case is full of twists, okay? While the jury's considering what sentence to hand down, a lawyer on Ben's defense team looks over at the prosecutor's table and notices a document. It's a receipt from Crimestoppers. If you remember, Crime Stoppers is a community-based organization that allows people to make anonymous tips and pays for them if they pan out.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
So the document on the prosecutor's desk showed that the star witness against Ben, Gladys Oliver, had received some money in exchange for identifying Ben. Gladys Oliver said she didn't receive any money at all from any source, but she did. She received money from Crimestoppers.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And I should note, spoiler alert here, I should note that decades later, we discovered Gladys also received thousands of dollars from Ross Perot. At that point, we didn't know that. But here's the problem with the Crimestoppers reward. If the jury had known that she was receiving any money, Ben's attorneys could have used that information to undercut her credibility.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
It happens all the time. It even has a name. It's called a Brady violation. So studies show that when someone is wrongly convicted and later exonerated, the police and prosecutors... were involved in misconduct 60% of the time. So more than half the cases, there's prosecutorial or police misconduct. In Ben's case, the judge looked at the fact that Gladys had lied and he vacated the conviction.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And at this point, you know, the state decides, okay, we're going to just try him again. Before the second trial, a prosecutor offers Ben a deal. He says, look, if you plead guilty to aggravated robbery, a lesser charge, we will ask for less time and you'll be out in two or three years. And Ben told me later what he thought of that offer.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Yep. He went to trial, and this time he got just what his attorney had predicted, a life sentence.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
It's called the trial penalty. Yeah. So, you know, if you plead guilty, you get a lesser sentence. If you go to trial and lose, you get a really high sentence. And that's what happened with Ben. So Ben's attorney, Frank Jackson, told me that in a way he kind of saw the sentence as almost inevitable.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Yeah, I asked him that 30 years later, and here's what he told me.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
So he was sent to the largest maximum security prison in Texas. It's called the Cofield Unit. And he doesn't really like to talk about this time, but standing back for a second, This was a really interesting time for crime and punishment. Things were changing so quickly. And I'll quote Charles Dickens here. It was basically the best of times and the worst of times.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
So soon after Ben was sentenced, the 1980s turned into the 1990s, right? And the 1990s were really a pivotal decade. On the one hand, it's a decade of getting really tough on crime. You'll remember... The first three strikes, your outlaw was passed in 1993.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Bill Clinton pushed through two really tough crime bills in 1994 and 1996. There was the crack epidemic, and people like Hillary Clinton talked about super predators, which was this racist notion that gangs of young black men were roving around the cities killing without remorse. The kinds of kids that are called super predators, no conscience, no empathy.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
That theory, by the way, has since been debunked. And on top of it all, the Supreme Court started making it really, really hard to appeal convictions. But on the other hand, it was the best of times, right? There was an incredible technological development that happened. The DNA revolution. DNA started proving beyond a doubt that people had been wrongly convicted.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And this is this is also the time that there was this new legal organization that was founded was called the Innocence Project. Right. And they use DNA to exonerate person after person after person.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
A man who spent three decades in prison for rape is cleared of the crime.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And suddenly, you know, average Americans started to see how deeply flawed the criminal justice system really was.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
So DNA didn't help Ben. There was no DNA in his case to test. So Ben did appeal his conviction, but of course, Aisha, he lost.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Yeah, but here's the thing. Without DNA or some other kind of major mind-blowing evidence, appellate courts almost never, never contradict jury verdicts. They always affirm them. because they don't want to second-guess a jury. They're like, well, you know what? We weren't there to assess the evidence or the witnesses, so we are just going to affirm this jury verdict.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Amazingly, he did not give up hope. I mean, one thing was he had his faith and a belief that truth would eventually come out. But also another prisoner gave him the name and address of a group that would reinvestigate dubious convictions. Now, this was before the Innocence Project. Do you remember we talked about Jim McCluskey?
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
He's the former seminarian who dedicated his life to the wrongly convicted. So he also got me onto this story. He had started this little nonprofit called Centurion Ministries, and Ben began writing them But Jim said, you know, it was really hard to take his case because Centurion, which was the only game in town, was flooded, flooded with hundreds of requests a year. And this is what Jim told me.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And then one day in 2001, Jim McCluskey shows up at Cofield Unit, He spent an hour talking to Ben through this plexiglass divide in the visitor's room, which I have seen too. So they spent an hour together. And this is what Jim said.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Well, I went in with an open mind. You know, I poured through hundreds of pages of documents and it really became clear that Ben hadn't gotten a fair trial because the case relied entirely on witnesses who wanted a monetary reward or a jailhouse informant who wanted a lighter sentence.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
He was just really happy when he saw Jim McCluskey at Cofield Unit.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
So I have to say, I didn't know for sure that Ben was innocent, but I was pretty convinced that the witnesses were lying and it seemed really clear to me that the trial had gone off the rails.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Right, right. So to do that, let's go back to March 22nd, 1987, Dallas, Texas. Now, back then there were two Dallas's. There was West Dallas, right, which is a poor, largely black neighborhood. It was suffering through the crack epidemic. And Ben Spencer lived in West Dallas. He was 22 years old. He was Black. He had no violence in his background. He had a job loading and unloading trucks.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
He was newly married. And he and his wife had a baby on the way in two months. So they were saving money for a new house. And they wanted to move away from the dangerous streets of West Dallas. And then there was the other Dallas. A wealthy, glitzy city fueled by oil money, exemplified by this super popular primetime soap opera called, naturally, Dallas.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And this was also the Dallas of H. Ross Perot. You may remember he's a self-made billionaire and entrepreneur. Good afternoon. Perot would eventually run not once, but twice for president.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Well, the two Dallases collided. March 22 1987 was a Sunday night and Jeffrey young was an executive in the clothing import business and he went to his office in the warehouse district of Dallas he was 33 years old, he was married to his high school sweetheart he was father of three children. And we don't know exactly what happened because there were no security cameras around recording it.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
But the police were able to put details from the crime scene together. And here's the theory based on the evidence. When Jeffrey Young came out of the office around 9.30 p.m., the assailant or assailants pushed him back into the building, ripped off his wedding ring and Seiko watch, and took the cash out of his wallet.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Young was struck on the head with a blunt instrument, which cracked his skull in five places. He was then placed in the trunk of his BMW and taken to West Dallas. Despite the lethal blow to his head, somehow he managed to open the trunk lid and fall out. And the assailants panicked. They drove the car into the alley, into an alleyway, and then they ran away.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And Jeffrey Young died in the hospital at 3.05 a.m. So for the first couple of days, the neighbors said, you know what? We didn't see anything, nothing. But police were under this enormous pressure to solve the case. I And also, Jeffrey Young had a really powerful connection. His father was one of Ross Perot's top executives. So after Young's death, Ross Perot posted this huge reward, $25,000.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And that was a lot of money back then in 1987. Right after that, three witnesses come forward.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
So the first one was a 42-year-old woman named Gladys Oliver. And her house looked down on the alley, and she said she knew the two men running from the BMW. They were her neighbors. So this wasn't a stranger identification. This was a friend or neighbor identification. Ben Spencer, she said, and another man named Robert Mitchell ran away from the car.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And after she gave her statement to the police, she suggested that they talk to two teenage boys who just might have seen the same thing. The police went to talk to the two teenage boys and they corroborated her story. So that afternoon... Four days after the crime, police went to Ben's house and arrested him.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Aisha, years later, I interviewed Ben in prison, and he recounted that arrest as vividly as if it had happened just yesterday. He told me that on March 26, that day, he'd been suffering from a migraine headache, and he went home to sleep it off. And here's what he said, and just as a note, it's a little noisy because we were in the visiting room and there were a lot of people there.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
It's like a bad dream. But, you know, afterwards, after I met Ben, he wrote me a letter to explain what had been going through his mind. And shockingly, he was not panicked. He didn't freak out. This is what he wrote, quote, Well, I wasn't really scared at first.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
I knew that they had made an awful mistake when they arrested me, and I believed that it was just a matter of time before they figured that out.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
That's right. He thought the justice system would work. But in fact, it didn't. And let me tell you why. There seemed to be, on the surface at least, a strong circumstantial case against Ben. So first, there were these three eyewitnesses who knew Ben, and they swore that they saw Ben running away from the car. But that wasn't good enough for the police.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
So police needed someone to connect Ben to the actual assault. And so fortunately for them, there was a jailhouse informant named Danny Edwards who came forward and he told police that Hey, Ben described the entire assault to me when he and I shared a jail cell after Ben's arrest.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
That's right. That's right. But when you look closer at the evidence, it isn't all that compelling. So the three eyewitnesses, they wanted that $25,000 reward money. And the jailhouse informant was facing 25 years in prison, and he wanted a lighter sentence in exchange for his testimony. And I got to tell you, Aisha, this happens all the time. We see it all the time in wrongful convictions.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Bad eyewitness testimony is involved in 70% of wrongful convictions, either by mistake or on purpose. And the jailhouse informants, those guys have incentive to lie to get a shorter sentence. So police use them all the time. to close cases, especially weak cases.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
You know, experts tell me that the United States is the only Western country to use people in jail, people who are probably not that trustworthy to close a case. And, you know, the more serious a crime, the more likely police are to use informants. If you look at innocent people who are sentenced to death and then exonerated, jailhouse informants put them there 25% of the time.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
That's exactly right. Yeah. But other than the jailhouse informant and the eyewitnesses, there was zero, nothing connecting Ben to the crime. There weren't fingerprints. There wasn't blood. Police never found the victim's stolen property at Ben's house when they searched it. They never even found a murder weapon.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
And Ben actually had an alibi, a friend who said she was with him when Jeffrey Young was attacked several miles away. But no one believed her. And this brings us to the other thing that's really common in wrongful convictions. And that's this phenomenon called tunnel vision. Here's how Daryl Parker described it. He's a former cop who became a private investigator.
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The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
You're absolutely right. And on October 31st of 1987— Ben Spencer was convicted of murder.
Up First from NPR
The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Yeah, yeah. But remember, this is Dallas, 1987. And back then, black men almost always faced all white juries. And the view of the police was often that, gosh, if this black suspect didn't commit this particular crime, well, he committed another. So we might as well just put him in prison, get him off the streets. And there was a sense that I heard over and over again that any black man will do.
Up First from NPR
The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Yeah, in fact, he did. He was appointed a lawyer who was actually quite reputable at the time. The problem was the lawyer only presented an alibi defense. And honestly, alibi defenses never work. They never work. And in this case...
Up First from NPR
The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
Not right away. The conviction was vacated. Okay. So the whole thing was thrown out because of something Ben's lawyer discovered while they were waiting for the jury to decide the sentence.