In 1987, Ben Spencer, a young black man from Dallas, Texas was convicted in the killing of a white businessman. He was sentenced to life in prison by an all-white jury. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime and he had an alibi. Over the years, eyewitnesses recanted their testimony and a judge, after reviewing all the prior evidence, declared Spencer to be an innocent man. Nonetheless, Spencer remained in prison for more than three decades. For seven of those years, former NPR correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty follows and followed the twists and turns of this case. Her dissection of wrongful convictions and the criminal justice system is at the heart of her new book, Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, A Conviction And The Fight to Redeem American Justice. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, part one of a two-part series looking at why it is so hard to get a conviction overturned even when evidence of innocence is overwhelming. Part two is also available now on the Up First podcast feed.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Full Episode
I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. As a journalist, you know, sometimes there are stories that just stick with you. And, you know, I'm certainly not alone in that. Some people, when they're reporting, encounter a story that changes their entire life. And that's what happened to Barbara Bradley Haggerty.
For years, Barbara covered the Department of Justice and religion for NPR. She eventually moved on to become a contributing writer for The Atlantic, still focusing on issues of law and justice. But then in the summer of 2016, she was on the hunt for a new story, and she called a favorite source of hers, Jim McCloskey.
Jim was a former seminarian who found his calling reinvestigating the cases of people who he had thought had been wrongly convicted. So when Jim picked up Barbara's call, she asked him this one question. What's the case that haunts you? Here's how he answered.
Of all the cases, Ben Spencer's case. Ben Spencer's case haunts me. There's probably not a day that goes by that I don't at least think of Ben.
At the time, Ben Spencer had been in prison for 30 years. Ben is a Black man, and he was convicted in 1987 of killing a white man in Dallas. Jim believed he was innocent. A judge had even declared him innocent 20 years after the original conviction. But the elected judges on the Texas High Court had disagreed, and so it seemed Ben would spend the rest of his life in prison.
For the next seven years, Barbara dedicated herself to reporting on Ben Spencer's case. Now she's written a book about it, Bringing Ben Home, A Murder, A Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice. She joins us now. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Aisha. It's good to be here.
So I got a million questions, but I guess first, like, what was your frame of mind when you started your own reporting on this story? Did you believe that Ben was innocent or did you think that he might be guilty?
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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