Opinion: Why is America so slow to exonerate the wrongly convicted?

While the wheels of justice turn slowly, the old aphorism goes, they grind exceedingly fine. Yet, as the civil rights activist Rev. Benjamin Chavis told me almost 50 years ago, “they rarely operate in reverse.”

Back then, I covered Chavis’s post-conviction hearing for the New York Times. Chavis led the Wilmington Ten , whose criminal case became a political cause. Their 1971 arrest for arson and conspiracy followed urban unrest in the North Carolina port city. Armed white vigilantes and Ku Klux Klansmen had attacked the Black community. The United Church of Christ dispatched Chavis to reduce racial tensions.

Chavis and the others found sanctuary in a church during the violence and steadfastly denied the subsequent charges. Testimony from three Black men — one mentally unstable and a convicted felon who later recanted — brought conviction. Most of the 10 sentences involved about 30 prison years.

Despite numerous investigation and trial irregularities, including alleged prosecutorial misconduct, Chavis’s “wheels of justice” proved prescient here: A state judge ruled the Wilmington Ten’s trial was fair and their lengthy prison sentences just in 1977.

Ultimately, an international campaign to free those still imprisoned included Amnesty International, writer James Baldwin and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young.

Notwithstanding, in 1978 North Carolina’s politically timid Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, declined to pardon the men (the group’s lone woman’s sentence had completed), or commute their sentences. Instead, he reduced sentences so they would be paroled within 24 subsequent months. Chavis was the last paroled, on Christmas Day 1979.

A year later, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Wilmington Ten’s convictions. In 2012, Gov. Beverly Perdue issued them a pardon of innocence . Chavis is now a Duke University fellow in environmental justice and racial equity.

What recalls this past travesty of justice is a new book , “Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice,” by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, who for many years covered the Justice Department and religion for NPR.

Hagerty’s focus is Ben Spencer, a 22-year-old Black man, newly married and expecting his first child, with no previous violent offense record, whose 1987 murder conviction brought nearly four decades behind bars.

The victim, a 33-year-old white businessman named Jeffrey Young, was bludgeoned while working late at his Dallas, Tex., clothing import office. Forced into the trunk of his BMW and driven to a poor Black neighborhood, his body was found in the street near his abandoned car.

Young’s father was a senior executive with Ross Perot’s Dallas-based Electronic Data Systems. Perot, about to launch his third-party presidential run, offered a $25,000 reward for any suspected killer’s indictment.

The initial police investigation was pitiful: an unsecured site; no crime scene photos; no physical evidence (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) recovered. The prosecution’s case involved three residents claiming they witnessed Spencer exiting the car in darkness, and a jailhouse snitch claiming he overheard Spencer confessing his guilt.

At its root, Hagerty argues, the systemic problem with Spencer’s conviction, and countless similar others, is a form of investigative tunnel vision that academics call “confirmation bias.” Once police and prosecutors develop a case theory, they ignore new information undermining it. To reinforce their scenario, they sometimes cut corners — or worse.

“Police, rushing to find the culprit while the trail has scent, have been known to discard or ignore evidence that points away from their suspect,” Hagerty writes. “Prosecutors have rationalized burying a piece of evidence because it muddies the clear story they are trying to tell in the interest of serving justice.”

Spencer’s case result was predictable.

“Convicting an innocent person is easy,” Bradley concludes. “Undoing this mistake is almost impossible.”

Centurion Ministries, an Innocence Projects movement forerunner, took on Spencer’s case in 2001, over a decade post-conviction. Centurion’s guiding inspiration from Deuteronomy (16:18-20) admonishes legal authorities: “You shall not judge unfairly: you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just. Justice, justice shall you pursue.”

Years later, Hagerty joined Centurion’s efforts, asking herself the fundamental question many writers do: “How could I, a journalist without subpoena power, with no weapons but curiosity and a tape recorder, reinvestigate a settled conviction?’

Notwithstanding, Hagerty actively assisted Centurion and the Dallas district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, conducting scores of interviews, making key discoveries — and identifying the likely killer.

Two purported eyewitnesses admitted lying about seeing Spencer at the scene. A third received a hefty chunk of Perot’s reward money before testifying, something the prosecutor illegally failed to disclose to the defense. The jailhouse snitch, whose lengthy prison sentence was reduced to two months for his testimony, recanted his account of his cell mate’s confession.

Spencer was freed on bond in March 2021, after 37 years incarcerated. On May 15, 2024, Texas’s Court of Appeals vacated his conviction.

Hagerty’s account rings true to someone like me who has covered racial injustice and the death penalty in the South for over 50 years. For investigative journalists, tackling cold criminal cases can be intoxicating. Even more so, as Hagerty illustrates in “Bringing Ben Home,” when efforts transcend reporting to actually correcting an injustice.

Obviously, such investigations’ chief goal is exonerating the wrongfully convicted — frequently indigents and people of color. Then, where possible, identifying the undiscovered guilty, which Hagerty did, although prosecutors rejected her finding.

Some states compensate wrongfully convicted individuals for their lost years of incarceration. However, police, prosecutors, judges and parole officials responsible for these miscarriages are generally shielded from civil action.

Despite their arrogance and recalcitrance, some extrajudicial accountability exists for officials responsible for injustice: Naming and shaming them in our articles and books, damning them with their own words. Much as they demanded of people whose lives they ruined, let them take responsibility for their actions. And, if they have any conscience, let them demonstrate their remorse and ask forgiveness.

Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist based in Durham, N.C. He is the author of “Met Her on the Mountain: The Murder of Nancy Morgan” and “Drifting into Darkness: Murder, Madness, Suicide and a Death ‘Under Suspicious Circumstances.’”

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