The Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction
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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. 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.
OK, 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 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.
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 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.
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