Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Bahar Avcilar
Categories
Politics & government

BRINGING BEN HOME

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

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 Younga 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. Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the author of the New York Times-bestselling Fingerprints of God and Life Reimagined. She is also an award-winning journalist who spent nearly 20 years as a correspondent for NPR. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and The Christian Science Monitor. A recipient of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion, and a Knight Fellowship at Yale Law School, she lives with her husband in Washington, D.C.

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Book Published 2024-08-06 by Riverhead

Comments

A spellbinding story of resilience and faith. It's a fascinating account of a broken justice system and what people are doing to help mend it.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty brings her keen eye to the phenomenon of wrongful convictions in this beautifully written and accessible exploration of an injustice in Texas. As she makes clear, when an innocent person is convicted, the harm transcends that individual's suffering and affects all of us.

Hagerty takes readers through Ben [Spencer's] story, from the rushed investigation to the uphill battle to prove his innocence. When describing each piece of the process, such as the use of jailhouse informants, Hagerty draws on examples from other exonerees' cases .including interviews with many people involved in Ben's case and excerpts of his letters from prison. Bringing Ben Home shines a wrenching, difficult spotlight on the U.S. legal system's potential for extraordinary failure...This could be a great read for YAs interested in law and justice.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty's painstaking reportage shines through with clarity, and that clarity beckons the reader to reevaluate justice, innocence, and equity in America.

Ben Spencer's story is beautifully told by a gifted and determined journalist: There is great suffering, injustice, corruption, waste, and, in the end, redemption. Barbara Bradley Hagerty's vivid account of his nightmare is simply unforgettable.

Bringing Ben Home achieves a rare feat: simultaneously infuriating, fascinating, and inspiring. The author's personal commitment to her subject and his family filled me with awe. This is a luminous book.

Bringing Ben Home explores the ways our legal system punishes the innocent and ignores its mistakes. This book is a revelation to anyone interested in justice, truth, and humanity.

In the tale of Ben Spencer's fight for freedom, we get righteous anger, unlikely grace, and Hollywood twists. But we also get that rarest bird in the annals of mass incarceration: hope. I was blown away.

A thought-provoking cultural discussion of wrongful convictions based on race. . The author's narrative persuasively demonstrates how deeply embedded racism is in the fabric of the American criminal justice system . A stirring account of a legal travesty that effectively reveals a rotten core within the justice system.

There are valuable lessons here about the reasons for wrongful convictions and the immense difficulty of obtaining justice. With drama, insight, and conviction, Barbara Bradley Hagerty describes how a remarkable team proved Ben Spencer's innocence and won his freedom.

As a member of the San Antonio Four who served 13 years in a Texas prison for a crime that never occurred, this book dredged up a lot of feelings and memories frustration, helplessness, and finally hope when someone on the outside believes you.

As someone who spent three decades as a trial court prosecutor, I was horrified by the casual callousness that led to many of the wrongful convictions detailed in this important, beautiful, and infuriating work.

Engaging . in the vein of a legal thriller . but what makes Hagerty's book important is its wider focus, setting [Ben] Spencer's tragedy in the context of rampant wrongful arrests and convictions across the country.