Barbara Bradley Hagerty

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?

And thank you so much, Aisha, for having me on.

Thank you, Aisha. It's good to be here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

And that was a lot of money back then in 1987. Right after that, three witnesses come forward.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.