Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice

When police and prosecutors settle on a theory of a crime, especially a capital murder case, they often default to adversarial mode: They will hear nothing that contradicts or undermines their conclusion—regardless of how compelling.

Former National Public Radio correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty illustrates this challenge to finding the truth in her excellent book, Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, A Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice.

With a few notable exceptions, she writes, law enforcement tends to reject out of hand any evidence or doubt that might shake this “confirmation bias,” a form of investigatory tunnel vision.

“Convicting an innocent person is easy,” she writes, “undoing this mistake is almost impossible.”

Hagerty is well equipped to tell this story, having covered the Justice Department (and religion) for NPR. She reports that, since 2012, when the National Registry of Exoneration, composed of law professors, began their pioneering work, the group has recorded that more than 3,400 innocent people have been convicted and exonerated over the past 35 years.

Frequently, these convictions depended on lying or unreliable eyewitnesses or jailhouse snitches hoping to reduce their sentences. Or on evidence that has been lost, concealed and/or destroyed by prosecutors.

The case covered in the book involves a Black man named Benjamin Spencer, a 22-year-old newlywed and expectant father, convicted of robbing and killing a white man named Jeffrey Young in Dallas in 1987.

Young, a 33-year-old father of three, was bludgeoned and forced into the trunk of his gray, two-door, 1982 BMW after working late at his warehouse office at the clothing importer. His body was found near the car in a poor section of West Dallas.

From the beginning, the police investigation was a shambles, a mixture of incompetence, sloth, and lassitude. Neighbors and witnesses interviewed at the scene were not logged in and identified for follow-ups.

The crime scene was not secured or photographed at the time the body and abandoned car were discovered. The vehicle was left unattended in an impound lot where it was exposed to rain, jeopardizing fingerprints on the exterior.

Young’s father was a high-ranking executive with Dallas-based Electronic Data Systems, headed by H. Ross Perot, who immediately offered a $25,000 reward for the indictment of any suspected killers. After Spencer’s arrest, Perot’s goal was to speed the defendant to prison, if not to Texas’ crowded death row, placing pressure on both police and prosecutors.

Spencer was convicted and spent more than 30 years in prison. The verdict was appealed, but, Hagerty writes, “The odds of proving his innocence were stacked against him at every stage of appeal.”

Two years into his sentence, Spencer was able to get over the high bar of Centurion Ministries, founded by Jim McCloskey, a Princeton Theological Seminary student. The ministry was dedicated to freeing wrongly convicted inmates and was the forerunner of what would become the Innocence Projects movement, later based on DNA matching and, even later, a procedure known as genetic genealogy.

For nine years, however, the ministry corresponded with Spencer, before officially accepting Spencer as a client in 2001. There were understandable reasons for their reluctance, beginning with the absence of DNA evidence in the case.

Still, once they accepted him as a client, McCloskey and Centurion were determined not to give up on proving Spencer’s innocence.

“From this day forward,” McCloskey told him in the prison visiting room, “you are a client of Centurion Ministries. We’re not going to stop fighting for you until you walk out of this place.”

McCloskey was as good as his word.

Yet Centurion’s subsequent years of investigation and litigation involved frustrating legal switchbacks and setbacks, until a new Dallas district attorney, John Creuzot, agreed to take another look at the ministry’s investigation. As a result, a judge agreed to release Spencer on bail on March 12, 2021. Creuzot recommended that the Texas Court of Appeals vacate the conviction, which they did on May 15, 2024.

Hagerty’s book is meticulously researched and densely documented in 33 pages of small type footnotes. Wisely, she unfolds the complex story in short, digestible chapters.

And, in the interest of transparency, she grapples with the conundrum of a privileged white woman writing about a poor Black man.

The confirmation bias Hagerty describes in the Spencer case has been well documented in numerous, gripping nonfiction crime books about wrongful convictions: from 1996’s Among the Lowest of the Dead by David von Drehle, to 2022’s The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson: A Battle for Racial Justice at the Dawn of the Civil Rights Era, by Chris Joyner.

Within the true crime genre, the gold standard is exoneration, ideally saving a death row inmate, usually a person of color, by proving innocence, often using DNA. For journalists taking on this kind of challenge, there are subsets: those who observe and report on this process, and those who participate in it, sometimes to the point of obsession.

Hagerty is in this latter category. When a paralyzed vocal cord ended her radio career, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, invited her to become a contributing writer to the magazine, predicting that she would find a story and “will realize you’re obsessed by it. You’re going to follow your obsession.”

And so, she was—and did. She stumbled on Ben Spencer’s case, which became a story for The Atlantic in January of 2018. From then on, she writes in the book’s Author’s Note, “I followed my obsession” and began work on this book, which included discovering new evidence. This involved identifying the likely killer, a finding dismissed by prosecutors.

Ironically, Hagerty asserts that “Because of its record number of executions and its record of mistakes, Texas has confronted its demons and emerged with a new vision,” she writes. “It has put in place more protections to prevent future mistakes and greater restitution for past ones than any state in the country.”

Houston and Dallas counties, which have greater resources, have been at the forefront of establishing their own wrongful convictions units.

Sometimes Hagerty wanders off the case’s narrative spine, perhaps providing more legal context and history—not directly connected to the Spencer case—than the average reader may need. But this is a small quibble. Also, unlike most true crime books, there is, alas, no photo section, a likely casualty of production costs.

In the researching and writing Bringing Ben Home, there was another revelation for Hagerty: “For decades, I had hidden behind the manufactured neutrality that shelters journalists from charges of bias and lawsuits. But sometimes, the ‘on-the-one hand, on-the-other-hand’ paradigm distorts the truth. . . . And so, for the first time in my career, I have blown through the boundaries of my craft and am stating my opinion: The justice system is broken, and Ben Spencer is innocent.”