Inside the wrongful conviction of Ben Spencer

No witnesses. No physical evidence. An ironclad alibi. Nevertheless, a Texas jury sentenced Ben Spencer to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

Journalist and author Barbara Bradley Hagerty shares what it took to set Spencer free.

Today, On Point: Inside the wrongful conviction of Ben Spencer.

Guests

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, journalist and author. Former NPR correspondent. Her new book is “Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, A Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice.”

Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Journalist and author Barbara Bradley Haggerty joins us today. She’s of course a former NPR correspondent and currently a contributor to The Atlantic. And she joins us today to talk about a man named Ben Spencer. Barbara, what a pleasure to have you On Point.

Welcome.

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: I am so glad to be here. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to start off with a little bit of tape that you gave us. This is from 2021 in a moment where you met Ben Spencer and here’s how that interaction went.

BEN SPENCER: My name is Benjamin Spencer. TDC number 483713, for 34 years.

HAGERTY: You’re no longer that number.

SPENCER: Not at this moment.

HAGERTY: Gosh, have you been waiting for a long time not to be a number?

SPENCER: Extremely long. Too long.

CHAKRABARTI: Barbara, tell us what’s happening in that moment.

HAGERTY: Wow. That really brings it back. So that was in March of 2021. Ben Spencer had just gotten out of prison after 34 years. It was not the first time I met him.

I had met him beginning in 2017, when I was assigned the story for NPR and The Atlantic. But it had, it was a long journey for him to get there. He had been convicted in 1987 of robbing and killing a white man, despite really, based on paper thin evidence, and even though a judge had ruled he was innocent, 20 years after the conviction, in an evidentiary hearing. He still didn’t get out. He didn’t get out until 2021. And so seeing him out for the first time was really revelatory. It was pretty moving actually.

CHAKRABARTI: This is the story that you write in your new book. It’s called Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, A Conviction, And the Fight to Redeem American Justice.

And Barbara I had the same response that I think you had when he first introduced himself in that little bit of tape in 2021, about directly going to the number that he was assigned while he was incarcerated. Can you just put me, put us in your shoes in that moment when he said that, like what was your response or reaction to how he still thought of himself at that moment?

HAGERTY: Yeah, it was really, the thing about Ben Spencer is he called himself a number. But he really never lost his character. So here’s a man who was 22 years old when he was arrested. No violence in his background at all. He was newly married, had a baby on the way. He was employed.

So was his wife. He was just a really good guy. He happened to be Black, and he happened to be poor and he ended up being convicted of this crime. But through those years, he never lost sight of who he was. He never got bitter. He wrote his wife often. I’ve read 2,500 pages of the letters that he wrote to his wife.

He never got bitter. He told her not to get bitter. He told her that the truth would eventually come out. He just held to this. And eh hung out only with kind of innocent people or good prisoners. He didn’t get into gangs. He didn’t get into trouble. He worked all the time. He never really lost sight of himself.

So even though he said he was a number, I think fundamentally, he was an even better person when he came out than when he went in, he was more seasoned or even more able to cope with trouble, more able to just believe that the truth would come out and so it was pretty moving.

Yes, he was a number, but he was so much more.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s a testament to the resilience of his spirit, right? But of course, it’s a tragedy that resilience had to be put to the test after being wrongfully incarcerated for more than 30 years. And that’s the story that you write in the book, Barbara. Let’s, I’d love to go back to the beginning of this awful experience that Ben had, and you just gave us the broad outlines of the crime that he was wrongfully convicted for.

Can you give us a little bit more detail? What happened with this murder that he was accused of?

HAGERTY: Sure. On March 22nd, 1987, it was a Sunday night. A man named Jeffrey Young was working late at his office in the Warehouse District of Dallas. He was 33 years old, he was an executive, he was white, he was married with three children under the age of 10.

And police don’t know exactly what happened, because there aren’t cameras, there weren’t cameras there, but they believe that one or two people saw him coming out of his office, attacked him, took his watch, took a jam box, which is a radio TV thing, took his wedding ring, hit him over the head with a blunt object, cracked his skull in five places, put him in the trunk of his BMW, drove the BMW over the Trinity River in Dallas, into this poor Black neighborhood of West Dallas.

Somehow Mr. Young got out of the trunk, fell on the street. The perpetrators looked in the rearview mirror, saw him on the street, panicked, parked the car in an alley, and then ran away. So that was the crime. The investigation was really pretty spotty. Okay. By the way, Mr. Young died at 3:05 in the morning.

So suddenly this robbery investigation became a murder investigation. So the police went around to West Dallas. And at first, people said that they saw nothing that night. And then there was a series of rewards offered, totaling $35,000, and that brought out a whole slew of witnesses. And in particular, three neighbors said that they saw Ben Spencer and another man running away from the victim’s car in the alley.

Now, Ben, at that point, as we mentioned, he was 22, newly married, no violence in his record, based on the allegations of these three witnesses, he was arrested. Now there was nothing connecting him to the crime. His fingerprints weren’t found in the car or in the office. They didn’t find any stolen property in his house.

He had an alibi, but he was arrested. And the police actually only needed one thing to clinch their case. They needed to connect him to the actual assault. So happily for them, a jailhouse informant named Danny Edwards said that Ben confessed to him in prison. And based on that, he got a much lighter sentence.

Based on that, and the three witnesses, Ben was convicted and he eventually got a life sentence.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we’re going to talk about the role of this jailhouse informant here in just a second. But three purported eyewitnesses. That stands in stark contrast to the fact that, as your book and the reporting shows, there was never any physical evidence to tie Ben Spencer to the murder of Jeffrey Young.

But what did those eyewitnesses claim to have seen?

HAGERTY: Yeah, the eyewitnesses said that they all saw from different vantage points Ben Spencer get out of the car and another man named Robert Mitchell get out of the car. Now, it was a dark night. It was a cloudy night, 10 o’clock at night. They were all at least 93 feet away.

Science has shown that you have to be at that kind of, in that dimness and at that distance, you have to be within 25 feet to actually identify someone. But they said one was 93 feet. I think a hundred, the other was 113 feet. And the other was nearly a football field away, nearly 300 feet away. So they said, Oh, we saw Ben Spencer.

And they said they didn’t coordinate their testimony, but later we learned that they actually did. And based on that, it was a really easy case to solve. Look, there was a lot of pressure on the police to solve this case. It was a white man, a fairly affluent white man who was killed, found in the poor Black neighborhood of West Dallas.

Not only that, the white man was the son of one of Ross Perot’s top executives. If you’ll remember in 1987, Ross Perot was, he was about to run for president. He was a big man on campus in Texas. So Ross Perot offered this reward. He put a lot of pressure on the police to solve it quickly. And when three neighbors came along and said, yeah, we saw Ben Spencer.

That was good enough.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself that this is 1987, as you just said, and I suppose in the intervening decades, we’ve had some significant changes in the terms of standard of evidence in these major crimes as they come to trial. That’s also something I want to go over with you a little bit later, Barbara. But from your book and your reporting, as you said, just the assertion of these three purported eyewitnesses was, and the jailhouse informant, was enough to have been sentenced to 35 years in prison. In the book, you also say, though, that he had been offered a deal, but he didn’t take it.

HAGERTY: So here’s what happened. He was actually sentenced to 35 years in prison in 1987. But what happened is that his defense lawyer looked across, in the courtroom, looked over and saw that, oh my gosh, there was a Crime Stoppers Report with one of the witnesses names on it. The witness, Gladys Oliver, had said that she didn’t receive any money.

No money for her testimony. Where here in black and white, it showed that she had received $580 from Crime Stoppers. That was enough to vacate the conviction. And so what happened is the prosecutors came to Ben and said, Okay, we really don’t want to try you again. So we’re going to offer you a plea deal.

You will be out in two to three years if you just plead guilty to aggravated robbery. And Ben said, Wait a minute, I’m not going to plead guilty to something I didn’t do. And his lawyer was like, Look, Ben, they’re going to ask for life. You better take this deal. And Ben said, No, I’m going to go to trial. I didn’t do this thing.

He goes to trial in 1988, a year later. And sure enough, based on the same witnesses, this time Gladys Oliver did not lie about the Crime Stoppers money. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, right? Can I tell you what the twist? The reason I was interested in the story in The Atlantic was to, Meghna, is that Ben was actually declared innocent 20 years later.

So there’s a group named Centurion Ministries. They were getting people out of prison, innocent prisoners out of prison. Reinvestigating their cases 10 years before the Innocence Project was even founded. And Jim McCloskey, the head of it, took up Ben’s case in 2001, and he re-investigated and found a lot of evidence showing that state witnesses had lied, that Ben was innocent, his alibi was good, and he got all this evidence before a trial judge in 2007.

And in 2008, the trial judge said, you know what? He is innocent. But he still spent years more in prison.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.