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PRODUCT
Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice
Product Description:
Price:
$15.99
Detailed description:
How states are making their legal systems more equitable, seen through the story of a Black man falsely imprisoned for thirty years for murder.
In 1987, Ben Spencer, a twenty-two-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young—a crime he didn’t commit. From the day of his arrest, Spencer insisted that it was “an awful mistake.” The Texas legal system didn’t see it that way. It allowed shoddy police work, paid witnesses, and prosecutorial misconduct to convict Spencer of murder, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in prison.
Eventually independent investigators, new witness testimony, the foreman of the jury that convicted him, and a new Dallas DA convinced a Texas judge that Spencer had nothing to do with the killing, and in 2021 he was released from prison.
As Spencer’s fight to clear himself demonstrates, our legal systems are broken: expedience is more important than the truth. That is starting to change as states across the country implement new efforts to reduce wrongful convictions, and one of the states leading the way is Texas.
Award-winning journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty has spent years digging into this issue, and she has immersed herself in Spencer’s case. She has combed police files and court records, interviewed dozens of witnesses, and had extensive conversations with Spencer, and in Bringing Ben Home she threads together two narratives: how an innocent Black man got caught up in and couldn’t escape a legal system that refused to admit its mistakes; and what Texas and other states are doing to address wrongful convictions to make the legal process more equitable for everyone.
By turns fascinating and enraging, personal and provocative, Bringing Ben Home is the powerful story of one innocent man who refused to admit that he was guilty of murder, and how his plight became part of a paradigm shift in how the legal system thinks about innocence as it institutes new methods to overturn wrongful convictions to better protect people like Ben Spencer.
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Product group:
Categories: Best Books of 2024 So Far
Product name:
Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice
Price:
$15.99
J. Lancourt –
A compelling review of basic flaws in our criminal justice system, both in the case of one man, Benjamine Spencer and so many others. This is a must read for those interested in how we must proceed to avoid so many miscarriages of justice. Fairness and morality demand it.
STEVEN D DRUMMOND –
There is so much to learn from this book, so much to be angry about, and so much to be inspired and deeply moved by. The story of what happened to Ben Spencer in 1987, the story of his long, lonely fight against the injustice done him, and the story of Bradley Hagerty’s dogged, years-long reporting journey to find out the truth, combined to keep me reading well into the night, and thinking about it for days afterward. Along the way I learned some shocking truths about how law enforcement and the criminal justice system work — or rather don’t work — in this country.
A major accomplishment by a brilliant writer.
LJ –
So well written. You will be invested every step of the way!
Payton Box –
I want to start off with this book is dense, it’s written so well, but at the same time, it really feels like a non-fiction book meant to teach you something. It’s the kind of book you read and digest every word and that takes time. So I read it slow, 50 pages a day, until I realized I had to sit down and read this book until I finish because it was making me hate any other book I touched in the meantime.
As a former law student, who wanted to become a public defender, and got offered the job, but turned it down, this book was exactly what I needed. It haunted every thought while I was working, reading any other book, driving, basically if I could have been reading instead it’s what I wanted to do.
This book so into such depth of criminal procedure, the issues with all sides, and the cases and precedence that got our criminal justice system to the point it is. You’ll learn so much about criminal trial procedure, criminal investigations, appeals, and the development of the innocence project and DNA testing. It brings everything together so well in each part of the book that it feels like you are there, and you’ll remember all the little details as the story goes on!