Barbara Bradley Hagerty
speaker
127 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
You're absolutely right. And on October 31st of 1987— Ben Spencer was 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. He went to trial, and this time he got just what his attorney had predicted, a life sentence.
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.
Yeah, I asked him that 30 years later, and here's what he told me.
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.
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.
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 had been wrongly convicted.
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.
A man who spent three decades in prison for rape is cleared of the crime.
And suddenly, you know, average Americans started to see how deeply flawed the criminal justice system really was.
Showing 101–120 of 127 · page 6 of 7
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