What I Learned Helping Free an Innocent Man

We stood on the covered balcony, and behind us, the rain poured down in sheets, cascading from the roof of a two‑story apartment complex in a dodgy part of Dallas. Daryl Parker, a private detective, raised his hand to knock, then noticed I was standing directly in front of the door. He placed his hands on my shoulders and silently moved me to the side.

“Sometimes they shoot through the door,” he whispered. In my 35 years as a journalist, this risk had never come up.

“Who is it?” a woman yelled from the hallway.

“Ma’am, it’s Daryl Parker,” he called out, clarifying nothing.

Moments passed. Parker lifted his hand to knock again when the voice, closer now, asked, “What do you want?”

“Ma’am, we’re looking for Jimmie Cotton.”

The door opened, and Cotton, the key witness we had been chasing down for several days, stood before us.

It was June 27, 2017, and the next few minutes would open a fissure in the case against Ben Spencer, a Black man who was convicted of robbing and beating to death a white man named Jeffrey Young at a Dallas warehouse. Back in 1987, Spencer was 22 years old, employed, and newly married with a baby on the way. No physical evidence connected him to the crime. He had no history of violence. An alibi witness placed him miles away from the assault. The jury sent Spencer to prison for life based on the testimony of three neighbors who didn’t see the assault itself but claimed they later that night saw Spencer running away from the victim’s car. They also relied on a jailhouse informant who swore that Spencer had confessed to fatally beating Young

By 2017, when I was reporting the story for The Atlantic , Spencer had endured 30 years at the H. H. Coffield Unit, a maximum-security prison. The story sparked some outrage; one fellow prisoner wrote in to assert that everyone knew Ben Spencer was innocent. But without the support of the district attorney, Spencer would languish in prison for the rest of his life.

[ Read: Can you prove your innocence without DNA? ]

Spencer’s story haunted me. Convinced that he was innocent, I continued researching, moving to Dallas for a few months, interviewing dozens of people, and hunting down evidence. I found crucial documents in a rusty, abandoned clothes dryer, and forensic material that could be tested for DNA was discovered in a mismarked box in the crime laboratory. Armed with new evidence, a new district attorney reopened the case, and Spencer was released in March 2021, 34 years after he was incarcerated. As I chronicled Spencer's journey, described in my new book, Bringing Ben Home , I was surprised to discover a reverse observer effect—that the act of reporting changed me in three fundamental ways . I have learned—though, like anyone, I’m still learning—to show up in the hard moments, to take the long view, and to cherish a version of my faith stripped down to the bare essentials.

Parker and I followed Cotton into his mother’s apartment. The blinds were drawn, the room lit by a single lamp casting a faint yellow glow. When Cotton was 17, he was one of three neighbors who swore he saw Spencer exiting the victim’s car. What do you remember about that night? I began.

As if he had been waiting for this question for 30 years, Cotton blurted out: “I ain’t going to say it was him; I ain’t going to say it ain’t him. Because it was dark.”

With that, the interview became a confessional. He told us that he saw a man get out of the car, but that the man was rushing away from him. He never actually saw his face. Later, he said that another neighbor had pressured him to identify Spencer so they could split a $25,000 reward. The lie had eaten at Cotton for three decades. He agreed to take a polygraph and sign an affidavit with his account.

Over the next few weeks, Parker, who had followed Spencer’s case and approached his legal team, offered to help me track down witnesses, charging nothing for his time. As we knocked on doors across Dallas—“manhunting,” Parker called it—I would learn a wondrous trick: Don’t call ahead; just show up . I was amazed at how well this worked. One witness described seeing the victim on Puget Street, her neighbors surrounding him as his life ebbed away. “You let the man lay there, like a dog in the street?!” she had yelled, furious. This didn’t exonerate Spencer in any way, but it did add to my understanding of the crime that was the center of the story. Another witness, whom we discovered and who had never been interviewed, swore that Spencer had been with him at his home at the time of the assault miles away: “I probably can’t remember the little things. But I know one thing. I saw him there.”

[ Robert Kolker: The neighbors who destroyed their lives ]

Showing up is simple in theory, excruciating in practice. I recall sitting in my car, gazing at the house of one of two Black jurors who had served on Spencer’s trial. I dreaded having to talk my way into a stranger’s house, but finally forced myself to get out of the car on the count of three. Thankfully, the man who opened the door did not slam it in my face, as had so many others, but invited me in. He proceeded to describe his recollections of the other jurors’ bias and the brevity of the deliberations: “When we go back into the jury room, everybody’s already decided he’s guilty,” he said, particularly the 10 white jurors who, he felt, wanted to go home.

Had I not knocked on these doors, I would have missed some evocative descriptions and key exculpatory evidence that would later be crucial to the legal work that eventually freed Spencer. My reporting taught me that pearls don’t lie in the open, but must be pried out, carefully. And I was surprised to find that this journalistic insight changed my approach to relationships and made me a better friend. Just as it’s easy to text a source and think the reporting is done, it’s also convenient to like a Facebook post and think you’ve connected. Yet as a family friend observes: You can fake caring, but you can’t fake showing up. Now I try to run toward trauma, to arrive during the hard hours when a friend or colleague or family member has been waylaid by physical injury, emotional grief, professional setbacks. It’s so much easier to avoid the heartache, to reason that I wouldn’t know what to say and to drive away without knocking. I now know that’s wrong. I still struggle to make that call or ring that bell, but I am working on it.

In the course of my research, I stumbled across a second essential truth that is so often overlooked. Time is not only an enemy of truth, but also its friend . As a news reporter for nearly two decades at NPR, I understand the urgency of the moment. It is frantic, clamorous, insistent on quick resolution. Not surprising, then, that when three of Ben Spencer’s neighbors, eager for a $25,000 reward, offered investigators a simple solution, it was an easy sell. When a jailhouse informant, facing 25 years in prison, related a “confession” by Spencer, it sufficed. In the urgent moment, plucking fact from chaos can be difficult. The crime must be solved while witnesses are available, memories are fresh, and evidence is at hand. Yet time can also reveal the truth. Old loyalties dissolve. Conscience eats away at sleep. A person no longer has a reason to lie.

In 2017, Parker and I tracked down Danny Edwards at a group house in Dallas. The jailhouse informant was the only witness to connect Spencer to the fatal beating at the warehouse; he testified that Spencer vividly described the assault when the two shared a jail tank. Edwards, fresh out of prison for yet another crime, greeted us affably, gently setting down his puppy before shaking our hands. He instantly volunteered that Spencer had never confessed to beating the victim. “He said they was accusing him of doing it. He didn’t even know the guy. He ain’t ever been over there.”

[ From the November 2022 issue: Jake Tapper on a Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment ]

“Mr. Edwards, you’ve lied in the past,” I said. “Can I ask why we should believe you now?”

“Frankly, I don’t care, ma’am,” Edwards replied. “I don’t got any reason to lie to you. I pay my own bills. I do my own thing. It was different when I was young”—when he was facing a long prison term if he didn’t testify against Spencer, and a perjury charge if he changed his mind. “But that shit is over with. It won’t hurt me now.” The statute of limitations for perjury had run out decades earlier.

We thanked him, and he agreed to sign an affidavit. As we were leaving, he looked me in the eye. “Ben didn’t do it,” he said, shaking his head. “In my heart, he didn’t do it.”

Spencer viewed time differently. For him, time was measured not by how long it takes to get something done , but by how long it takes to get something right . In 2005, when he was coming up for parole for the first time, he warned Debra, by then his ex-wife and but still his most faithful supporter, “There is no telling how much longer I will be in here.” To get parole, he explained, you must accept responsibility for the crime. “I will never accept responsibility for a crime that I did not commit. Truth has always meant more to me than my freedom.”

The passage of time would become, for some, the most compelling evidence of Spencer’s innocence. “I have doubts about whether or not Ben Spencer did it,” Andy Beach said, unprompted, just after I turned on the tape recorder on December 20, 2020, nearly 34 years after Spencer had been incarcerated. It was an unexpected revelation coming from the prosecutor who put Spencer behind bars for life. “If Ben Spencer had admitted his guilt 15 years ago, he probably would have gotten paroled. The fact that year after year after year he comes up and refuses to admit it, that gives me a lot of pause.”

This reassessment runs counter to human nature. The more wedded a person is to an outcome and the higher the psychological cost of reversal, the less likely he is to correct what might be a mistake. It’s called “escalation of commitment.” But Beach was one of the rare prosecutors who could be swayed by cognitively dissonant evidence.

Having watched Beach’s dawning recognition and observed Spencer take the long view, I know that truth can take its sweet time, but eventually, it will assert itself. It may even heal. Now I try to avoid snap judgments. (I often fail.) I try to remember that this political moment may estrange me from some friends, but I trust that time will turn a razor-edged disagreement into something akin to sea glass. I try to step back and wait, because buried in the rubble of expediency, hurt feelings, and suspicion is a nugget of truth. It can just take a while to dig out.

My final lesson was more unexpected, more revelatory. I had always taken my Christian beliefs seriously, but after 2016, I despaired as I watched fellow believers revel in a dark new gospel: Mock your neighbor, strafe your enemies, demonize the stranger, plunder what is Caesar’s. In reporting Spencer’s story, I found, yes, exculpatory evidence, but also something more profound: I glimpsed the power of a stripped-down faith.

The lean faith of Jim McCloskey, who introduced me to Spencer’s story, arguably launched one of the past century’s most significant revolutions in American jurisprudence. In the fall of 1980, in his second year at Princeton Theological Seminary, McCloskey began volunteering as a chaplain at Trenton State Prison. There, he met a man convicted of murder who insisted he was innocent. McCloskey was skeptical: He believed the American legal system to be largely inerrant. But he put his studies on hold for a year, time enough to unearth a mound of exculpatory evidence. A judge exonerated the prisoner.

Upon graduation from seminary, McCloskey recognized that his call was not to the pulpit but to the wrongly convicted. In 1983, a decade before the Innocence Project was founded, he launched Centurion Ministries, the country’s first national organization to investigate dubious convictions.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews barely defines faith; rather, he describes it by what it does, by its propulsive nature. Faith prompted Abraham to abandon his settled life for a promise; it impelled Noah to build an ark; it spurred Moses to lead a people through the wilderness. Dip into the Hebrew prophets and you’ll find faith that is both simple and strenuous: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, defend the destitute.

Sloughing off the complexities of politics or theology, McCloskey focused on a single biblical task: helping the prisoner. His organization has rescued dozens of innocent people from life in prison or from execution, including the hardest cases, such as Spencer’s, which lack the DNA evidence necessary to score a conclusive win.

Spencer focused on the durability of truth. On the night Spencer received his life sentence, in 1988, he told Debra: “One day the truth will come out and I’ll be home.” Over the next three decades, Spencer clung to a single idea: that the truth would emerge. During his years of incarceration, Spencer lost his freedom, he lost his marriage, he lost the joy of raising his son from infancy to manhood, he lost one friend after another as they left prison, exonerated or paroled. But he never lost his conviction that the truth would eventually break through.

[ Read: How the ‘Central Park Five’ changed the history of American law ]

The breakthrough occurred 34 years after his arrest. John Creuzot, the new Dallas County district attorney, joined with Spencer’s defense team to petition for his release, arguing that he had not received a fair trial.

On March 12, 2021, Spencer walked out of the Dallas jail. Against protocol, the guards had opened the doors to the lobby of the jail, and I watched, startled, as more than 200 people surged in, laughing and high-fiving. Family, friends, and strangers who had followed his case moved as one, carrying me in with them, and I felt the staggering power of the moment. Ben and Debra appeared from the corridor and halted, dumbstruck, as people started cheering. They moved forward slowly, holding hands, Debra smiling uncomfortably, Ben beaming.

Later, as he stood outside Debra’s home, now his as well, I asked him: “Can you believe it, Ben?”

He shrugged. “I always felt that God was working in my life.”

I observed this laserlike spiritual focus from a front-row seat. Now my faith, too, has been pared down to the essentials—one that depends not on political or doctrinal purity, but on Micah’s question: What does the Lord require of you but to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God? I am content—no, relieved—to be a mere Christian. It is enough to help repair the world. It is more than enough to help repair one life.