Up First from NPR - The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

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

I'm Ayesha 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 re-investigating 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, Ayesha. 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, 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. 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. Okay, well before we kind of dive in deeper, can you tell me about Ben Spencer and how did he get charged with this crime? Right, right. So to do that, let's go back to March 22, 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. 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, you know, 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 prime time soap opera called, naturally, Dallas. called, naturally, Dallas. 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. The volunteers in all 50 states have asked me to run as a candidate for president of the United States. Okay, so what happened on March 22nd? Well, the two Dallas's collided. March 22nd, 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, 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 930 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. 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. 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 mean, this was a black on white murder. 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 posts this huge reward, $25,000. And that was a lot of money back then in 1987. Right after that, three witnesses come forward. Well, I mean, $25,000, that's a lot of money even today. And I mean, definitely a lot of money back in 1987. So who were these witnesses and what did they have to say? 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. And after she gave her statement to the police, she suggested that they talked 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. 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 had 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. So I wake up to somebody beating on the door. I get up and I'm going to as I'm going to the front door I can see a bunch of police cars out in front of the house. I wonder what's going on out here. So I open the door I see all these cops on the on the porch and so this detective he said you have any ID I said sure I put rest in my back pocket put out my ID and handed to him he said turn around put your hands on the wall you you bent you're under rest I said under rest for what he said you hear about the white guy they found

in the street the other day I said yeah I heard some about it he said that's what you're under rest for his murder I I said, no, I said, you got the wrong guy. He said, he said, no, we got the right guy. My goodness. I mean, I can't imagine waking up to that and being accused of murder. I know 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 this is what he wrote. Quote, well I wasn't really scared at first. I knew that I hadn't done anything wrong so I did not feel as though I had anything to worry about. I knew that I hadn't done anything wrong, so I did not feel as though I had anything to worry about.

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. Yeah, so he was thinking that, well, if I had nothing to do with this, they would just realize they got the wrong person and, you know, things will go back to the way they were, right? 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 I should that wasn't good enough for the police. 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, 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. Well, I mean, all of this evidence, I mean, it does sound so incriminating, especially because the people knew him and they saying they saw him.

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.

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. 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. 25% so a quarter of the time is jailhouse informants. Right for people on death row. Who turn out to be innocent. That's exactly right. Yeah.

But other than the jailhouse informant and theewitnesses, 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. 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. It's a known phenomenon among investigators and police and it's that investigators and police are so driven to catch the person that just did this heinous crime that they find someone, they focus on them to the exclusion of all others. And then they start making the evidence fit their theory

instead of making their theory fit the evidence. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like human nature, but obviously that's a lot stacked against Ben. You know, you've got the tunnel vision, the jailhouse informants, this reward money, and then we can't ignore the fact that you have power and you have race involved in this as well. You're absolutely right.

And on October 31st of 1987, Ben Spencer was convicted of murder. So the worst outcome for Ben. It just seems so wild that based on a few people saying something, you could be convicted of murder. 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. I mean, obviously that's a part of how Ben ended up in prison. Can I ask you, did Ben have a decent lawyer? 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, it did not work. And then Ben ends up in prison. Well actually, not right away.

Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So he didn't end up in prison right away? Not right away. The conviction was. Okay. Okay. What happened? So you didn't end up in prison right away? 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. More after the break. Stay with us. support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels with over 300 independent hotels around the world each

exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autograph collection dot-com. This message comes from Lady Mafia. This is the story of the glorified loan shark swimming in the murky waters of fast money and shady deals. Did she blow $10 million of other people's money? Lady Mafia is available for listening now on The Binge, wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with a Sunday story talking to Barbara Bradley Haggerty about Ben Spencer. Ben's just been convicted of murder, but the judge throws out the case.

So Barbara, like, what happened? 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 Crime Stoppers. 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. 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 Crime Stoppers. And I should note, and it's a 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 Crime Stoppers reward. If the jury had known that she was receiving any money, Ben's attorneys could have used that information to undercut her credibility.

So basically the witness lied and the prosecutor knew it because they had the receipt. So does that happen often? 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. 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. I think it was the Friday before the second trial began.

Frank Jackson, who was my attorney at the time, he comes and talks to me in his holdover and he was like, you know, the state is offering you a 20-year deal, a non-aggravated 20 years if you're a sign for it. And I said, sign for it for what? I said, I didn't do anything. He was saying, well, you know, if you take it you're signed for it and I said sign for it for what I said I didn't do anything. He was saying well, you know if you take it to trial They're gonna try to give you a life sentence and likely to get it and so I'm like, well I don't care what they like to get I said, I'm not gonna plead guilty to somebody and do so he went back on trial again

Yep, he went to trial and this time he got just what his attorney had predicted, a life sentence. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, that's why people often take deals, whether they're guilty or not. It's called the trial penalty. 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. 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.

It's hard to overcome a dead white guy, a white person, who's killed by black or two black men in a black area of Dallas, where you dump his body out on the street. It's just hard to overcome those kind of emotional case. I can only imagine how that probably, you know, affected the jury. But how did Ben take this? Yeah, I asked him that 30 years later and here's what he told me. Well, to be honest, after the after that I was sentenced to life, I could not see that. That night the trial was over kind of late.

I was the only one on the floor at the time. I was the only one in the holdover. And it's cold. And to be honest, I really wanted to die. I thought about committing suicide while I was in the holdover. And I'd start thinking about, I mean, I have my faith, I have my belief, and I was like, well, if I die, if I kill myself, I can't go to heaven, you know. And so that was the only hope I had was I didn't want to go to hell.

So I was like, well, I can't do that. And so it was like I began to think about it. I said, well, you know, I didn't commit this offense. The truth is eventually going to come out. You know, I mean, even there he's leaning on his faith. Where was Ben sent to serve out his sentence? 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. And so when you say the best of times and the worst of times, what do you mean? 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. When you commit a third violent crime, you will be put away and put away for good. Three strikes and you are out. 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. 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 have been morally convicted. And this is also the time that there was this new legal organization that was founded. It was called the Innocence Project, right? And they used DNA to exonerate person after person after person. The 72-year-old was exonerated by DNA, which made history as the oldest exoneration by DNA in the United States. Ricky Davis, who served more than 13 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. A man who spent three decades in prison for rape is cleared of the crime.

Man who spent 25 years in prison tried twice, DNA now setting him free. And suddenly, you know, average Americans started to see how deeply flawed the criminal justice system really was. So did Ben Spencer's attorneys, you know, did they try to jump on this bandwagon? And was there any DNA that they could use to get him off? 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. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess that he should have had a chance on appeal. 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 the 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. And so basically, Ben was stuck.

Did Ben just kind of give up hope at this point? 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? 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 with hundreds of requests a year. And this is what Jim told me. Ben first wrote us in the late 80s. We didn't take his case on until 2000. 2000, that's at least 10, 11, 12 years. Ben never complained. He kept on patiently and in detail,

answering our questions. He never said, woe is me. His focus was to get Centurion Ministries on this case. 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, they spend an hour together. And this is what Jim said.

When I walked away thinking, we can't leave this man behind. We just can't do it. He had nothing to do with this crime. By this point, Ben has been in prison a long time. Like, it's amazing and just now he's getting someone to pick up his case. He was just really happy when he saw Jim McCluskey at Cofield Unit. And I would imagine things change after this. Maybe not quickly, but they change. That's right. Be sure to listen to the second part of our series about Ben Spencer in which Barbara Bradley Haggerty

describes the uphill battle to prove his innocence. A battle fought by both Ben on the inside as well as a handful of people on the outside. You can listen to that episode now, right here in the Up First Podcast feed. You can listen to that episode now, right here in the Up First Podcast feed. This message comes from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You give yourself the gift of better mental health.

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