Barbara Bradley Hagerty

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.

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.

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.