Photographs for The Atlantic accompanying Barbara Bradley Hagerty's 2018 report on the case of Benjamine Spencer, who has spent three decades serving a life sentence for the robbery and murder of Jeffrey Young despite evidence of his innocence.
On March 12, 2021, Benjamine Spencer was released after the court found he was convicted with false testimony but he was not exonerated.
Mr. Spencer's defense team is still fighting to prove his innocence.
On March 26th, 1987, Spencer was arrested for the robbery and murder of Jeffrey Young. Spencer had no record of violence nor did the physical evidence connect him to the crime.
H. H. Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, Texas. The state’s case relied entirely on the eyewitness testimony, two young men who backed eyewitness story, and a jailhouse informant who insisted that Spencer had bragged about the crime when they shared a cell.
Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministriesa: a national
non-profit organization dedicated to the vindication of the wrongly convicted.
non-profit organization dedicated to the vindication of the wrongly convicted.
Photographs of the people freed by Centurion Ministries. The group has exonerated 61 prisoners, frequently without the benefit of DNA evidence.
Benjamine Spencer’s Centurion Ministries case file.
McCloskey stores case files in the basement of his New Jersey home. He first met Benjamine Spencer in prison, in 2000.
Cheryl Wattley, a former federal prosecutor, who Centurion Ministries hired to represent Benjamine Spencer.
Daryl Parker, a private investigator and former marine and criminal investigator, worked with Ms. Hagerty to interview witnesses from Mr. Spencer's trial.
Photographs of the alley on Harston St in Dallas, Texas where, according to eyewitness testimony, Spencer emerged from Jeffrey Young’s stolen BMW.
Police failed to properly secure the scene at the time, hindering later efforts to reconstruct the events of March 22, 1987. With the advancement of technology, forensic experts can rebuild and render crime scenes digitally.
based on measurements in a police diagram that had been made six months after the crime, forensics concluded that none of the witnesses could have identified the man leaving the BMW, even if he had been standing still and not running away.
At most, they could have seen a silhouette.
On March 12, 2021, Benjamine Spencer was released after the court found he was convicted with false testimony but he was not exonerated.
Mr. Spencer's defense team is still fighting to prove his innocence.