BookPeople Presents: Barbara Bradley Hagerty - Bringing Ben Home

Please welcome Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Mike Ware and Ben Spencer to celebrate Bringing Ben Home: A M**der, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice!

This event is free and open to the public.

• Start time: 7:00 P.M.
• Run time: 45-60 minutes, followed by a signing line.
• Location: The second floor of BookPeople.

The author will be signing and personalizing copies of the book after the speaking portion of the event.

• To get a book signed, a copy of the event book or an item of equal value must be purchased from BookPeople.

Guidelines:

• Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
• There will not be a live stream or recording available.
• BookPeople reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary.
• If you have any other questions, please visit our Eventbrite FAQ. If your question isn't covered in the FAQ, feel free to email us at [email protected].

About the book:

In 1987, Ben Spencer, a twenty-two-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young—a 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 M**der, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in Pr*son.

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 Pr*son.

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 M**der, 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.

About the author:

Barbara Bradley Hagerty is an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic and formerly of National Public Radio. She is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Fingerprints of God and Life Reimagined, and her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and The Christian Science Monitor. She has received 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.

About the moderator:

Mike Ware is the co-founder and executive director of Innocence Project of Texas. He has over 40 years' experience in criminal law and is a nationally recognized leader in the innocence movement.

About the guest speaker:

Ben Spencer was only 22 years old when he arrested for a robbery and M**der that he did not commit. Ben was a newlywed with a child on the way when he was sentenced in 1988. He spent 34 years in Pr*son before he was released in 2021 with the help of Centurion Ministries, attorney Cheryl Wattley and Innocence Project of Texas. Since his release, Ben has returned to work and focused on reconnecting with his family and sharing his story in the hope of inspiring others. In May of 2024, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals fully exonerated Ben.

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Thank you for supporting Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Mike Ware, and your local independent bookstore!

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