Barbara Bradley Hagerty is an eclectic journalist: In her working life at NPR and later at The Atlantic, she has relentlessly pursued stories that somehow connect the divergent tent poles of religion and criminal justice. Forced to leave her 19-year-long radio career by a paralyzed vocal cord in 2014, Hagerty began to rethink her life. In 2016, her search for deeper stories—and for answers about life’s meaning—brought her to Jim McCloskey, who years before had abandoned his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary to “reinvestigate the case of a prisoner he believed was wrongly convicted and persuaded a judge that the man was innocent.”
It was McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries, a man who at that point had already helped exonerate 54 people, who told her about an imprisoned Texan whose story haunted him: Ben Spencer, a “Black man convicted of robbing and killing a white man in Dallas in 1987.”
Locked up on a life sentence for decades, Spencer was McCloskey’s “unfinished business, his heartbreak,” Hagerty writes. Despite Herculean efforts, Centurion Ministries had been unable to win Spencer’s release.
