Centurion

You are very much involved with The Innocent Project.

Yeah, I've been on the board for 20 years in New York, the main Innocence Project, and still on the board of Centurion Ministries from Princeton, which is also an innocence group with about 75 exonerations in the past 40 years.

And I stepped into it innocently 20 years ago when I wrote a book called The Innocent Man, which is about a guy in Oklahoma who was almost executed for a crime he had nothing to do with, and I was fascinated by the story.

Wrote the book, and the research of that book took me into that world, and I had never been there before, and I was just fascinated by the reality that we have so many innocent people in prison in this country, and they're there for all the wrong reasons.

On May 20th, 2001, Jim McCloskey sat in the visitor's room at Coffield Unit, a maximum security prison a hundred miles south of Dallas.

McCloskey's organization, Centurion Ministries, was the first national organization to reinvestigate dubious convictions, and it had a near-perfect win record.

He told Spencer they were taking his case.

McCloskey quickly found problems with the conviction: the monetary incentive for the eyewitnesses, the informant's lies, the police failure to investigate a more viable suspect, the optical impossibility of identifying anyone running from the car on that dark night.

The system had failed them in 1987, and it tried to cover its mistakes for three decades.

The new prosecutor kept the Youngs in the dark until the last minute and presented Spencer's exoneration as a fait accompli.

Doing so re-traumatized them, Thompson told me, "You're leaving them with all the questions and none of the answers." Thompson, who founded Healing Justice, an organization dedicated to helping victims of violence and people who were wrongly convicted navigate toward reconciliation, said that anyone in the Young family's position would struggle to know who or what to believe.

"Dallas prosecutors told them one thing for thirty years," Thompson said, "and then the system is like, 'Just kidding.'" On August twenty-ninth, 2024, more than a hundred and fifty of Spencer's supporters, double the room's listed capacity, packed into the two hundred and eighty-third District Court in Dallas.

You did say something a moment ago when you were talking about some of the heavier reading that you do in your off time.

You mentioned wrongful convictions, and I know that that is something that you are involved with in advocacy work that you do with the Innocence Project and also Centurion.

And I was wondering if you could speak about about the work that these organizations do, but then also your involvement with them, how you got involved, what kind of role that plays in your life right now?

It goes back to a story.

So I became even more involved through the Innocence Project on the board and also working with cases.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Framed, which is another collection of 10 stories, all about convictions.

with a guy named Jim McCloskey who founded Centurion Ministries 45 years ago, another innocence group.

I'm on his board and he and I had a lot of fun putting our book together.