As the old saying goes, the wheels of justice turn slowly but with great precision, but as the civil rights activist Rev. Benjamin Chavis told me nearly 50 years ago, “the wheels seldom turn in the opposite direction.”
At the time, I was covering Chavis' post-conviction trial for The New York Times. Wilmington TenChavis's criminal case became a political issue. In 1971, he was arrested on suspicion of arson and conspiracy after urban unrest erupted in a North Carolina port city. Armed white vigilantes and members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked the black community. The Christian Coalition deployed Chavis to try to ease racial tensions.
Chavis and his companions took refuge in a church during the riot and vehemently denied the subsequent charges. They were convicted on the basis of testimony from three black men — one mentally unstable and one convicted felon who later recanted — and most of the 10 sentences were around 30 years in prison.
Despite numerous investigative and judicial irregularities, including allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, Chavis's “Wheels of Justice” proved prescient here. The state court ruled The Wilmington Ten's trials were fair and the long prison sentences given to them in 1977 were just.
Eventually, an international campaign to release those still imprisoned included Amnesty International, author James Baldwin, and UN Ambassador Andrew Young.
Nevertheless, in 1978, North Carolina's politically timid Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, refused to pardon or commute the sentences of the men (the only woman in the group had already completed her sentence), instead reducing their sentences so that they could be paroled within 24 months. Chavis was the last to be paroled, on Christmas Day in 1979.
A year later, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Flipped Wilmington Ten convictions. In 2012, Governor Beverly Perdue They were granted amnestyChavis now Environmental Justice and Racial Equity Research Fellow at Duke University.
This reminder of past wrongdoings New Books“Bringing Ben Home: Murder, Conviction, and the Fight to Restore Justice in America” by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Hagerty has covered the Department of Justice and religion for many years for NPR.
Hagerty focuses on Ben Spencer, a 22-year-old black man who is newly married and expecting his first child, and who has no history of violent crimes, but was convicted of murder in 1987 and has served nearly 40 years in prison.
The victim, a 33-year-old white businessman named Jeffrey Young, was beaten while working late at night at a clothing import office in Dallas, Texas, and then stuffed into the trunk of a BMW and driven to a poor black neighborhood, where his body was found abandoned in the street near the car.
Young's father was a senior executive at Ross Perot's Dallas-based Electronic Data Systems, Inc. Perot, who was running for president as a third party, had offered a $25,000 reward for the prosecution of a murder suspect.
The police's initial investigation was dismal: the scene was poorly secured, there were no crime scene photographs, and no physical evidence (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) was found. The prosecution's case relied on three residents who claimed to have seen Spencer get out of a car in the dark, and a prison informant who claimed to have accidentally heard Spencer confess to the crime.
Hagerty argues that the systemic problems behind Spencer's conviction and countless others like it are rooted in a form of investigative tunnel vision that researchers call “confirmation bias.” Police and prosecutors develop a theory of a case and then ignore new information that undermines it, sometimes cutting corners or doing worse to bolster their own scenario.
“In their rush to find perpetrators while the trail is still fresh, police have been known to throw out or ignore evidence that points to their suspects,” Hagerty wrote. “Prosecutors have justified hiding evidence because it obscures the clear story they are trying to tell in order to serve justice.”
The outcome of the Spencer case was predictable.
“It's easy to convict an innocent person,” Bradley concludes, “and it's almost impossible to undo that mistake.”
Centurion Ministries, a forerunner of the Innocence Project movement, took on Spencer's case in 2001, more than a decade after his conviction. Centurion's guiding principle, Deuteronomy 16:18-20, warns legal authorities: “Do not administer unfair justice. Do not show partiality. Do not accept bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and frustrates the righteous. Pursue justice, pursue justice.”
A few years later, Hagerty joined the Centurion effort, asking himself the fundamental question that many writers ask: “How could I, a journalist without subpoena power and armed only with curiosity and a tape recorder, review a confirmed conviction?”
Nonetheless, Hagerty actively assisted Centurion and the Dallas District Attorney's Office Conviction Integrity Unit in conducting numerous interviews, making key discoveries and identifying the possible murderer.
Two of the alleged witnesses admitted to lying about seeing Spencer at the scene; a third had received a large payment from Perot before testifying, which the prosecution illegally withheld from the defense; and the informant, whose testimony reduced a lengthy prison sentence to two months, recanted his testimony about his cellmate's confession.
Spencer was released on bail in March 2021 after 37 years incarceration. On May 15, 2024, the Texas Court of Appeals vacated his conviction.
Hagerty's story rings true to someone like me, who has covered racism and the death penalty in the South for more than 50 years. For an investigative reporter, working on an unsolved criminal case can be engrossing. It's even more engrossing when you go beyond the reporting to actually try to right a wrong, as Hagerty depicts in “Bring Ben Home.”
Of course, the primary goal of such investigations is to prove the innocence of those who have been wrongfully convicted, often poor people and people of color, and, if possible, to identify guilty people who have gone undetected. Hagerty did just that, even though prosecutors denied his findings.
Some states offer compensation to wrongfully convicted individuals for time lost in prison, but the police, prosecutors, judges and parole officers responsible for these wrongful convictions are generally immune from civil lawsuits.
Despite their arrogance and defiance, there is some out-of-court accountability for officials responsible for wrongdoing: publish their names in articles and books, shame them, and condemn them in their own words. Hold them accountable for their actions, just as they demand of those whose lives they have ruined. And, if they have a conscience, they should show remorse and ask for forgiveness.
Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist living in Durham, North Carolina. “I Met Her on the Mountain: The Nancy Morgan Murder Case” and “Drifting into the Dark: Murder, Insanity, Suicide, and Death 'Under Suspicious Circumstances'”
