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.

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."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Journalist and author Barbara Bradley Hagerty 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.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti and Barbara Bradley Hagerty is with us today. Her new book is Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, A Conviction, And the Fight to Redeem American Justice. And in the book, Barbara tells the story of Ben Spencer, who spent more than three decades in prison in Texas for a murder he did not commit.

And the story gives us new insight into not just wrongful convictions, but the barriers that are still in place in our society. Even after someone has been proven innocent, and why it can take so long for someone to be finally freed. And in Benjamin Spencer's case, it took years from the time where there was evidence that he was first innocent, all the way until he was finally released from prison.

Here's the moment. March 2021.

BEN SPENCER: I'm looking forward to this moment of getting to reconnect with my family, trying to reacclimate myself into freedom. And again, I appreciate everybody for their support and the love has been shown to me over the years. And just, I can't say enough about how much I appreciate and I thank you all for this. I'm thankful to finally have made it to this point in my life, and I just can't thank you all enough for helping me arrive at this moment. So thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Benjamin Spencer, March 2021 and that audio from CBS Texas. So Barbara, that was 20 years after people first started working on Spencer's behalf to really get to the truth about his case. You were just beginning to tell us that story, so tell us more. What first got Spencer's case on the radar of some of these groups?

HAGERTY: Sure. Jim McCloskey, Ben Spencer had written Century Ministries from almost the moment he got into in prison back in, 1987 or so, and Jim finally took the case, because it took him a while. He deals with a lot of death row cases. And so those have an expiration date. So finally got around to Ben's case and he found a lot of evidence suggesting that Ben was innocent and another man was guilty and a judge agreed.

In 2008, a judge ruled that Ben should be released, based on actual innocence. The problem is in Texas, a judge can't just release someone. They actually have to get affirmation. It has to be confirmed by the high court in Texas, the court of criminal appeals. The court waited three years and finally said, we don't think so.

There's no DNA in this case. And so it's not dispositive, Ben, you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison. It was 2011. And so after that, really, Ben Spencer had no legal remedy whatsoever. He really didn't. He had exhausted all his appeals. He still somehow believed that he would get out, and I don't know why, but he sure did.

I ended up getting the case, because I called up Jim McCloskey in around 2016, and I said to him, Jim, by this point, Jim had gotten out 60, 65 people from prison, and I said, Jim, what's the case that haunts you? And he said that's easy. Ben Spencer's case. He's been declared innocent and he's still in prison.

I'll be there for life. So I got an assignment from NPR and The Atlantic to go down to Dallas and spent the summer of 2017, much of the summer with a private investigator who donated his time and we just went all over Dallas trying to find new witnesses and find old witnesses and, frankly, I got to tell you, I had the time of my life.

It was really amazing what happens when you just show up at people's doors and knock on the door. And sometimes they slam the door in your face, but sometimes they let you in and you learn new things.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here for a second quickly, Barbara? Because of course also sometimes it can be a little bit nerve wracking knocking on people's door, which I want to hear from you about.

But again, about the mechanics. Which is what gives us insight to this like long term injustice that Ben Spencer underwent, just to remind folks. So there was the original trial in 1987. Spencer was tried again. And then as you say, when Jim McCloskey took up the case, he found evidence, including examination from a forensic scientist who says that it was physically impossible for those supposed eyewitnesses have actually seen or determined that it was Spencer. These are three key things that are undermining the entire case that led him to be incarcerated for so long. But then you said it was what, 2007, where this judge issued a finding of actual innocence. Now that's a very particular phrase.

Can you explain what that means?

HAGERTY: It just means that not only did he not get a fair trial, but he was actually innocent. It's a really high standard. Not getting a fair trial, preponderance of the evidence, right? It's kind of 51% actual, not getting, actually being actually innocent.

It has to, they have to believe that there is virtually no evidence to have convicted him, and a jury would not have convicted him. And there's dispositive proof of that. And the judge found that to be the case. The trouble is that the court of criminal appeals was looking for basically forensic evidence, DNA.

That's what they want. DNA. They call it a Herculean burden. And because Ben did not, because there was no DNA in this case, they just said he hasn't met the Herculean burden. We're not going to let him out. Now what you should know, too, and people know this, state judges and state appellate judges are elected.

In Texas, they tend to be elected on tough on crime platforms for appellate judges to then turn around and say, yeah, we don't think this guy, this murderer of a white man was guilty. That doesn't play well with the voters. And so they are unlikely to do it. And they ruled unanimously that he did not meet the burden, and he would stay in prison.

CHAKRABARTI: So but to be clear, the burden was on Spencer, the burden was on the accused to produce this Herculean level of evidence of their own innocence.

HAGERTY: And actually, the burden always shifts, once you're convicted, it shifts to you on appeal, but in this case it's a very high standard.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

Then, as you said, you got involved in reporting this story for NPR and The Atlantic, which later turned into, to the new book that you have out. And this brings us back to one of the things that you discovered regarding Danny Edwards, that jailhouse informant. How did you first, tell us the circumstances of your first meeting with Edwards.

HAGERTY: Yes, you just go to every address that's listed for someone, and we went to several, Daryl Parker and I, a private investigator, went to several addresses. And finally, we went to this house, group house, and it turned out that we met Danny Edwards' fiancé. He was gone. He was gone for the night.

He was at work, but he agreed. She gave us a cell phone number and we made an appointment to see him the next day. And the next day, now this was 30 years after Danny Edwards had testified against Ben. His testimony was pretty wild. It really countered everything that the state witnesses said.

It was very baroque. We'll put it that way. Like that he didn't think his fingerprints would be caught because he wiped them off on the cement. So he had no fingerprints, that kind of thing. So we meet Danny Edwards and it turned out that Danny Edwards had been facing a 25-year sentence, but he walked out two months after the second trial.

So he got a great deal. And we met up with him and we're like, so Danny, tell me, did Ben ever confess to you? He said no, he never confessed to me. He said that they said he did it. He didn't do it. So look, this is how the game is played. You just, you have to use whatever you can get to get out of prison, whatever it takes.

The best liar wins, he says. And I know, and we were surprised that it came out so easily. And we said, I said, so Danny, why should I believe you now? You've lied in the past. And he said, look, I don't care if you believe me or not. I have no reason to lie. Before I did, they were going to, if I went back on my statement, they were going to get me for perjury.

But now, I have no reason to lie. So whether you believe it or not doesn't matter. And then he said, so how is Ben anyway? And I said, Ben's still in prison. It's been 30 years. And he said, I thought he was out. And Daryl said, no. And how does that make you feel? And I won't use the word he said.

I'll use something close. He said, that makes me feel like shoot. He was devastated. He said, in my heart of hearts, he did not do it. He didn't do it. I just did what I had to do to get a lighter sentence.

CHAKRABARTI: This is Danny Edwards voice himself from a piece that you filed for NPR in 2017.

DANNY EDWARDS: No, he didn't say that. He said they was accusing him of doing it. He don't even know the guy. He ain't even been over there. In fact, he had proof that he wasn't over there that day.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so how did this admission by Edwards, did that have any immediate impact on Spencer's case for his freedom?

Not immediately. We also got another witness. who recanted on tape. It didn't have an immediate effect. And actually, I have to say, Meghna, this is one of the discouraging things. It was a real low point for me. The piece came out on NPR and in The Atlantic in January of 2018, and nothing happened.

And that's because it had no legal weight. You think you prove someone innocent and something's going to change. But what did happen eventually, and this is where Ben Spencer is the luckiest of the unlucky. A new district attorney was elected in 2018, John Creuzot. Before this, four district attorneys had refused to open, reopen Ben Spencer's case.

But John Creuzot heard this evidence, considered all the evidence that Daryl and I had found, or I had found in our investigation. Looked at it and said, Okay, we're going to reopen this case, and he assigned one of his prosecutors, Cynthia Garza, to go ahead and look at everything, and they found even more evidence that all the state witnesses had lied, that it just wasn't possible for Ben to have done this crime. And so eventually, because of serendipity, which is truly the scary part, right?

It was only because of serendipity that a new district attorney was elected, and Ben Spencer got a hearing because of that. He got out. The district attorney finally decided that he didn't get a fair trial. He decided not to tell the Court of Criminal Appeals that Ben was actually innocent.

People had tried that before and it didn't work. So what he did is he said, this man needs to be out because he didn't get a fair trial, and the Court of Criminal Appeals listened to that. And they agreed and three years later they said, you're right. He didn't get a fair trial. That was just in May of this past year.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So listeners, I want you to put a pin in what Barbara just said. That it really, Ben Spencer's life turned on the election of a new DA, because we're going to come back to that in the broader context of Texas's years long changes in the law, regarding trying to limit wrongful convictions. But there's a couple more details about what you discovered in your reporting, Barbara, that I would love to hear about.

And first of all Gladys Oliver. Can you tell me more about remind us about her role and then what happened later?

HAGERTY: Yes. Gladys Oliver was 42 years old. She was really the state's star witness. She was a really good witness apparently. And she got the other two teenagers to agree with her, to stick with the story, stick with the story, as one of them later told me. And so she was the one who orchestrated everything. She wanted this $25,000 from Ross Perot, $10,000 from Jeffrey Young's company and was a star witness and basically. As the foreman told me, the jury foreman told me, Alan Ledbetter, later, she was magnificent.

No one could lay a hand on her. She sounded so believable. I peeped out my window and I saw Ben Spencer. She was completely, completely believable. She stuck with her story, but then later what happened is in around 2010, so a long time after the conviction, after the evidentiary hearing, a couple of DAs, a couple of prosecutors, interviewed her again, and just to make sure they got everything right.

And in that interview, she said that she had collected $5,000 to $10,000 of reward money. Now, if that was true, that meant that she lied at the second trial when she said she only got the Crimestoppers money. What that meant was her whole testimony had to be thrown out, and it was based on her testimony that Ben was still in prison.

So what happened to her conversation in 2010? It just went in the files. That was before John Creuzot arrived. It just went in the files, and no one mentioned it. And then when John Creuzot came along and he assigned his prosecutor to look into everything, lo and behold, she goes into the prosecutor's files and finds his statement that shows that Gladys Oliver had lied at the second trial.

By this point, Jimmy Cotton, the other, another eyewitness had recanted. One of the other eyewitnesses was dead. Danny Edwards had recanted. There was virtually nothing left of this case against Ben Spencer. And that was what really convinced them that they should go ahead and ask that Ben Spencer be released pending a new trial, that he did not get a fair trial.

CHAKRABARTI: When you talked with Ben in 2021, you asked him specifically about Gladys Oliver and her original testimony, which put him in prison and here's what he told you.

BEN SPENCER: I have no place in my heart for hatred. I don't believe that it's conducive to anything positive, first and foremost. And I just don't believe that she, I'm making excuses for her, but I truly in my heart, don't believe that her interest was in getting me convicted of a crime I didn't commit.

I believe her interest was in collecting a reward, not realizing that she would be compelled to testify in order to receive the reward.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell us a little bit more about Ben's view of not just Gladys, but the cumulative impact of all the lies essentially that sent him to prison.

HAGERTY: Ben Spencer made a decision really early on.

You hear this a lot with exonerees, with people who've been exonerated after having been wrongly convicted. He decided that anger and bitterness were a cancer. They would kill him. They would infect him. They would infect his family. And he just decided not to be bitter. He decided that eventually the truth would come out. He, you hear him say, he's making excuses for her, right? He's making excuses for the person who put him in prison. But what he did is, what he would do is he would stand in people's shoes and say, look, I can see where they're coming from. She needed the money. I give her a pass.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Barbara writes about not just Ben Spencer's wrongful conviction in 1987, but the long and arduous process that a person still has to go through in Texas in order to regain their freedom years after their innocence has been proven. Now, For Ben Spencer, that moment of freedom finally came in March of 2021, and Barbara interviewed Ben Spencer soon after that.

And here's what he told Barbara about how the world had changed in the 30 plus years he'd been incarcerated.

SPENCER: Dallas has gotten big. There's a lot of change. You go places today itself at a little, the gathering we had, there's a little girl. She can't be no more than three. No more than four, and she has a cell phone. That's unheard of. So it's a lot different. People are texting everywhere you go. None of that was taking place when I left in 1987.  

CHAKRABARTI: That's Ben Spencer speaking to Barbara Bradley Hagerty in March of 2021.

Now there's so many other small, like smaller parts of your reporting that you reveal in the book, Barbara, that I wish we had time to go into, but unfortunately, we do not. So I want to get to one of the sort of bottom lines that I learned in reading the book, and that is, can you just talk to me for a minute about why, even after there's this finding of actual innocence, Ben's life still revolved around this happenstance of a new DA being brought into office? That the system can know that there's someone who is actually innocent, still in prison and not be moved to do something about it.

I think that's the part that like really boggles the mind.

HAGERTY: Yeah, it boggles my mind too. And it's not just Texas. All of these things that happened to Ben, they happen all over the country. There have been 3,400 people who've been wrongly convicted that we know about since 1989, right? So this is, his story is typical.

What is astonishing is that Appellate courts, that it's really hard to get out, once, even though, even in the face of actual innocence. And the reason is that appellate courts basically do not like to second guess jury verdicts. They're like, you know what? The jury was there. They assessed the evidence.

They listened to the witnesses. They had a much better view of who was lying and who wasn't. We're going to just stick with the jury verdict. And there, there's some things that help them that they rely on things like harmless error, which we're hearing a little bit about these days.

Where, okay, maybe the prosecution made a mistake, maybe a witness wasn't quite accurate, but you know what, that was harmless error. It wouldn't really have affected the verdict, the jury verdict, that kind of thing. And so that jury, the appellate courts are really unwilling to let people, to recognize innocence and overturn a jury verdict.

And it's actually gotten worse and worse as the years have gone on, particularly, actually, particularly now. What's happened now is that the roots to the federal courts used to be that an innocent person, a person who was innocent, could appeal to the state courts, and, they may or may not listen, but look, state judges, state appellate judges, they're elected, so they have to think about the voters, and are they going to let this person out, so no, okay, they say no, so they go to the federal courts, the judges are there for life, they are relatively immune from political pressure, they can actually take a serious look.

Is this person innocent? Was he wrongly convicted? That kind of thing. What's happened since 1996 is Congress passed a law that was pretty draconian and basically cut off prisoners or people's ability to access the federal courts. And year after year, the Supreme Court has actually narrowed the passage, narrowed the ability for innocent prisoners to get to the federal courts, such that the Innocence Project and the Innocence Project doesn't even think about the federal courts anymore.

They just have to rely on the largesse of the state courts. And I think one of the scariest things that's happened is the court, the U.S. Supreme Court crossed this existential threshold in 2022, where a man who was on death row, provided evidence that he didn't get a fair trial and he was actually innocent. A federal judge said yes, an appellate federal court said yes, and the Supreme Court said no, you know what, in the interest of finality, he's not getting a new trial.

He's not getting out. So he's going to die, even though he may be innocent. Fortunately, the Attorney General of that state, Arizona, pardoned him because he didn't want an innocent man dying in Arizona. But it's gotten to the point where it's really hard to get innocent people out of prison using the federal courts.

And it's scary.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me just ask you something, Barbara. When you said that even appellate judges are unwilling or they dislike second guessing a jury opinion, even in cases where the jurors themselves later say, we made the wrong decision because of things that we either didn't know at the time, because I think that's what happened in Ben's case too, right?

HAGERTY: That is what happened. It didn't matter. They said, he didn't, there's no DNA in this case. It doesn't matter. There was the jury foreman who was one of his greatest advocates who wrote letters and it simply didn't matter. They would not second guess that verdict, even though the jurors second guessed their own verdict.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is all happening to Ben and regarding the very slow evolution of his case that ultimately led to his freedom, all in the context of some significant changes over the past 20 years that have happened in Texas itself, and the state's efforts to reduce wrongful convictions there. Of course, there are still wrongful convictions that happen.

We were just looking at some numbers that in 2023, 22 people were exonerated in Texas, because they had been wrongfully convicted. Interestingly, 12 of those cases were actually tied to the misconduct of a single narcotics officer who was formerly with the Houston PD. But, and I know you know this better than anyone, this is actually still a dramatic drop from where Texas was with wrongful convictions several decades ago.

And we did some digging around on this, and in fact, the state has made so many improvements in curtailing those wrongful convictions that in 2017, Michelle Feldman at the Innocence Project said that quote, Texas at this point is the gold standard in innocence reform. Barbara, in order to understand that more, we spoke with Sam Bassett.

He's a criminal defense attorney in Austin, and he walked us through some of the changes Texas has made.

BASSETT: There's a commission called the Texas Forensic Science Commission in Texas, that was created in the mid 2000s by the Texas Legislature as a response to a lot of problems with the Houston Crime Lab and the Houston Crime Lab had false or misleading results in cases that had led to investigations, dismissals and even exonerations.

CHAKRABARTI: The details are quite gripping, because in 2002, local news reports had revealed shoddy practices at the Houston Police Department Crime Lab. The Houston PD then requests an audit, which later revealed massive crises at the lab, including poor record keeping, technicians who lacked basic knowledge of blood typing, and evidence that a lab official had even offered, quote, false and scientifically unsound reports and testimony.

So that audit concluded that some 5,000 to 10,000 criminal cases in Houston needed to be reexamined. That was in the early 2000s. So then in 2005, the state legislature created the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which was originally tasked with investigating allegations of professional negligence in accredited forensic labs.

But the commission has also expanded its work to thoroughly examine the accuracy of various types of forensic evidence. So again, here's defense attorney Sam Bassett.

BASSETT: Blood splatter evidence, and they've criticized that. They've reached reports on other types of evidence that's just very unreliable, including some ballistics techniques that are used.

CHAKRABARTI: And more recently, they were critical of a testimony of a DNA specialist who testified in a murder case in Austin. It's become a very well renowned commission now. Still, between 2010 and 2017, more than 200 people were exonerated in Texas, meaning they had been wrongfully convicted. That's twice the number in any other state during the same period.

So in 2017, Texas lawmakers passed House Bill 34, which was a landmark law in the state that regulates the use of jailhouse informants, requires police to record interrogations and felony cases, strengthens rules for police station lineups used to secure eyewitness IDs. Now, HB 34 passed with a yes vote from almost every Texas state lawmaker and Governor Greg Abbott signed it into law of June of 2017.

Sam Bassett told us that some DA's offices also have conviction integrity units now, and those are staffed with legal teams that review old cases with questionable convictions.

BASSETT: And also, we use the death penalty more than anybody else. So obviously those death penalty cases get a lot of review on their own and then they redouble their efforts on forensic type issues on those cases.

CHAKRABARTI: Now the wrongful conviction rate in Texas, even with all these reforms, is still of course a long way from zero. And Bassett says there are other parts of the criminal justice system desperately in need of support, such as public funding for public defenders. And here, instead of being quite proactive, I'd say Texas has a long way to go, because it's relinquished much of the responsibility for public defenders to individual Texas counties.

More than 80% of funding for public defenders has to come from cash strapped counties, making Texas 46th in the nation in state spending on public defense, according to the Austin Chronicle. And Sam Bassett agrees.

SAM BASSETT: The big leap in Texas on funding indigent defense occurred when George W. Bush decided to run for president.

People were criticizing him because the state was awful with court appointed attorneys in murder and death penalty cases. It has progressed and it's continuing to progress, but a good lawyer can see things that an inexperienced or a lawyer who's just not incentivized to spend time on a case, you miss things.

It's an age-old problem. People who cannot afford counsel often don't get adequate representation at trial. And that's the root of the whole problem, in my opinion.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Sam Bassett, a criminal defense attorney in Austin. And Barbara, I appreciate you listening along with me to that because this is like the very interesting systemic backdrop to Ben Spencer's case.

Did any of these reforms have an impact on Ben Spencer as he was trying to seek his freedom?

HAGERTY: None of these reforms actually helped Ben. Actually, no, there was a reform that helped Ben and that is the Conviction Integrity Unit. Dallas was the first city. They created the Conviction Integrity Unit, and it was the Conviction Integrity Unit that reopened Ben's case and found that he didn't get a fair trial.

So yes, those reforms did really help, what I should say, it's really fascinating because I didn't know about the public defenders. But what I should say is one reason Texas looks so bad when it comes to exonerations is because they actually kept the evidence, a lot of states just throw out the evidence.

So you can't go back and retest it for DNA. In Texas's case, both in Houston, but especially in Dallas, they hung on to everything. And so you could go back 20 years later, 30 years later and test it and find out, Oh boy, we have the wrong person in prison. It was actually this other person. That's why they look so bad, is actually because they're good.

They actually have good practices. The other thing I would say is that what's interesting is that the conviction integrity units have multiplied all over the country, and now they represent, I think, 40% of, I believe it's 40% of all exonerations. So what that means is that because of this reform that Dallas started, people, the prosecutor's offices across the country are now taking cases and taking dubious cases, looking at them, re-investigating, and letting people out. So it's not just defense lawyers.

It's actually the prosecutor's offices themselves. And that is all because of Texas.

CHAKRABARTI: As we head towards the last couple of minutes here, Barbara, I keep thinking of the fact that first of all, even though Ben has been released, he hasn't been exonerated as of yet, correct?

HAGERTY: That's right. Yeah. That could happen in a month.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But he'll also never get back the 30 plus years of his life that he spent incarcerated. And I'm also thinking of the family of Jeffrey Young. It means that whoever killed Jeffrey Young is still out there. So the family doesn't, hasn't really received a final sense of justice here.

So even though Ben has his freedom now, which is to be celebrated, this is a story of a failed criminal justice system. And I wonder, as you went through it, as you did the reporting, as you talked to people who have been caught up in this failure, what impact did it have on you, Barbara, and your view of what justice means in America?

HAGERTY: Oh my goodness. I guess what I came to believe is that people get wrongly convicted because of human error. And people get out because of luck, right? Let me give you one scene. Do we have enough time for me to do it? Okay, Ben was remarried.

CHAKRABARTI: We've got a minute.

HAGERTY: Okay, Ben was remarried to his wife who stayed very loyal to him but divorced him, but stayed loyal.

And as you looked, it was 2022, and as you looked at the groomsmen and everyone on the stage, four of the, five of the men there were ex-cons. Four of the five, including Ben, were wrongly convicted. Four out of five of those men were wrongly convicted. And you look there, and you go, boy, those guys are lucky.

They are the luckiest of the unlucky. But in America, should freedom depend on luck?

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.