‘An Awful Mistake’ Might Soon Be Fixed—Finally
Every morning, long before dawn, Benjamine Spencer slips out of his bunk, dresses quietly in his white uniform, and heads to his job. He tiptoes so as not to wake up the 110 men in his dorm room—men who have been convicted of murder, rape, drug trafficking, and other violent crimes—in one of the most dangerous maximum-security prisons in Texas. For nearly 34 years, Spencer, who is Black, has served time for a robbery that resulted in the death of a white man, a conviction he insists is “an awful mistake.” And in this, he is not alone: A Texas trial judge, the foreman of the jury that convicted him, independent investigators and attorneys, alibi witnesses, not to mention three of the four witnesses who testified against him, have all said that Spencer had nothing to do with the assault. None of that has mattered. According to Texas courts, Spencer is a criminal who should die in prison.
Yet that may soon change. After an exhaustive investigation, the Dallas County district attorney, John Creuzot, now believes that Spencer did not receive a fair trial. Spencer is expected to walk out of prison in the next few weeks.
This is a remarkable turn of events in a system that emphasizes the finality of convictions over the possibility of innocence, in which convicting an innocent person is easy, and undoing a mistake is close to impossible.
Spencer’s misfortunes began on March
