--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: As a journalist, you know, sometimes there are stories that just stick with you. And I'm certainly not alone in that. Some people, when they're reporting, encounter a story that changes their entire life. And that's what happened to Barbara Bradley Haggerty.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: For years, I covered the Department of Justice and religion for NPR. I eventually moved on to become a contributing writer for The Atlantic, still focusing on issues of law and justice. But then in the summer of 2016, I was on the hunt for a news story and I called a favorite source of mine, Jim McCloskey.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Jim was a former seminarian who found his calling reinvestigating the cases of people who he had thought had been wrongly convicted. So when Jim picked up my call, I asked him this one question: What's the case that haunts you?
--:-- Jim McCloskey: Of all the cases, Ben Spencer's case haunts me. There's probably not a day that goes by that I don't at least think of Ben.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: At the time, Ben Spencer had been in prison for 30 years. Ben is a Black man and he was convicted in 1987 of killing a white man in Dallas. Jim believed he was innocent. A judge had even declared him innocent 20 years after the original conviction. But the elected judges on the Texas High Court had disagreed, and so it seemed Ben would spend the rest of his life in prison.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: For the next seven years, I dedicated myself to reporting on Ben Spencer's case. Now I've written a book about it, Bringing Ben Home, A Murder, A Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice. I join you now.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Aisha. It's good to be here.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I got a million questions, but I guess first, like, what was your frame of mind when you started your own reporting on this story? Did you believe that Ben was innocent or did you think that he might be guilty?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Well, I went in with an open mind. You know, I poured through hundreds of pages of documents and it really became clear that Ben hadn't gotten a fair trial because the case relied entirely on witnesses who wanted a monetary reward or a jailhouse informant who wanted a lighter sentence. So I have to say, I didn't know for sure that Ben was innocent, but I was pretty convinced that the witnesses were lying, and it seemed really clear to me that the trial had gone off the rails.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Okay, well, before we kind of dive in deeper, can you tell me about Ben Spencer, and how did he get charged with this crime?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Right, right. So to do that, let's go back to March 22nd, 1987, Dallas, Texas. Now, back then, there were two Dallases. There was West Dallas, right, which is a poor, largely black neighborhood. It was suffering through the crack epidemic. And Ben Spencer lived in West Dallas. He was 22 years old. He was black. He had no violence in his background. He had a job loading and unloading trucks. He was newly married, and he and his wife had a baby on the way in two months. So they were saving money for a new house, and they wanted to move away from the dangerous streets of West Dallas.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then there was the other Dallas, a wealthy, glitzy city fueled by oil money, exemplified by this super popular primetime soap opera called, naturally, Dallas.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And this was also the Dallas of H. Ross Perot, you may remember, he's a self-made billionaire and entrepreneur. Good afternoon, Perot. He would eventually run not once but twice for president.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Okay, so what happened on March 22nd?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Well, the two Dallases collided. March 22nd, 1987 was a Sunday night. And Jeffrey Young was an executive in the clothing import business. And he went to his office in the warehouse district of Dallas. He was 33 years old. He was married to his high school sweetheart. He was father of three children. And we don't know exactly what happened because there were no security cameras around recording it, but the police were able to put details from the crime scene together. And here's the theory based on the evidence.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When Jeffrey Young came out of the office around 9:30 p.m., the assailant or assailants pushed him back into the building, ripped off his wedding ring and Seiko watch, and took the cash out of his wallet. Young was struck on the head with a blunt instrument, which cracked his skull in five places. He was then placed in the trunk of his BMW and taken to West Dallas. Despite the lethal blow to his head, somehow he managed to open the trunk lid and fall out. And the assailants panicked. They drove the car into an alleyway and then they ran away. And Jeffrey Young died in the hospital at 3:05 a.m.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So for the first couple of days, the neighbors said, you know what? We didn't see anything, nothing. But police were under this enormous pressure to solve the case. I mean, this was a black-on-white murder. And also, Jeffrey Young had a really powerful connection. His father was one of Ross Perot's top executives. So after Young's death, Ross Perot posed this huge reward, $25,000. And that was a lot of money back then in 1987.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Right after that, three witnesses come forward.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Well, I mean, $25,000, that's a lot of money even today. And I mean, definitely a lot of money back in 1987. So who were these witnesses and what did they have to say?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So the first one was a 42-year-old woman named Gladys Oliver.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Her house looked down on the alley and she said she knew the two men running from the BMW. They were her neighbors. So this wasn't a stranger identification. This was a friend or neighbor identification Ben Spencer, she said, and another man named Robert Mitchell ran away from the car.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And after she gave her statement to the police, she suggested that they talk to two teenage boys who just might have seen the same thing.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: The police went to talk to the two teenage boys and they corroborated her story. So that afternoon, four days after the crime, police went to Ben's house and arrested him.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Years later, I interviewed Ben in prison and he recounted that arrest as vividly as if it had happened just yesterday. He told me that on March 26, that day, he'd been suffering from a migraine headache and he went home to sleep it off.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And here's what he said, and just as a note, it's a little noisy because we were in the visiting room and there were a lot of people there. So I wake up to somebody beating on the door. I get up and as I'm going to the front door, I could see a bunch of police cars out in front of the house. So I said, I wonder what's going on out here. So I opened the door. I see all these cops on the porch. And so this detective, he said, you have any ID? I said, sure. I put the rest in my back pocket, pulled out my ID and handed it to him. He said, turn around, put your hands on the wall. You're under arrest. I said, under arrest for what? He said, you hear about the white guy they found in the street the other day? I said, yeah, I heard something about it. He said, that's what you're under arrest for, his murder. I said, no. I said, you got the wrong guy. He said, no, we got the right guy.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Oh, my goodness. I mean, I can't imagine waking up to that and being accused of murder.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: I know. It's like a bad dream. But, you know, afterwards, after I met Ben, he wrote me a letter to explain what had been going through his mind. And shockingly, he was not panicked. He didn't freak out. This is what he wrote, quote, Well, I wasn't really scared at first. I knew that I hadn't done anything wrong, so I did not feel as though I had anything to worry about. I knew that they had made an awful mistake when they arrested me, and I believed that it was just a matter of time before they figured that out.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah. So he was thinking that, well, if I had nothing to do with this, they would just realize they got the wrong person and, you know, things will go back to the way they were, right?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: That's right. He thought the justice system would work, but in fact, it didn't. And let me tell you why. There seemed to be, on the surface at least, a strong circumstantial case against Ben.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So first, there were these three eyewitnesses who knew Ben, and they swore that they saw Ben running away from the car. But that wasn't good enough for the police. The police needed someone to connect Ben to the actual assault. And so fortunately for them, there was a jailhouse informant named Danny Edwards who came forward and he told police that, hey, Ben described the entire assault to me when he and I shared a jail cell after Ben's arrest.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Well, I mean, all of this evidence, I mean, it does sound so incriminating, especially because the people knew him and they saying they saw him. That's right. That's right. But when you look closer at the evidence, it isn't all that compelling.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So the three eyewitnesses, they wanted that $25,000 reward money. And the jailhouse informant was facing 25 years in prison and he wanted a lighter sentence in exchange for his testimony.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And I got to tell you, Aisha, this happens all the time. We see it all the time in wrongful convictions. Bad eyewitness testimony is involved in 70% of wrongful convictions, either by mistake or on purpose. And the jailhouse informants, those guys have incentive to lie to get a shorter sentence. So police use them all the time to close cases, especially weak cases.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You know, experts tell me that the United States is the only Western country to use people in jail, people who are probably not that trustworthy to close a case.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And, you know, the more serious a crime, the more likely police are to use informants. If you look at innocent people who are sentenced to death and then exonerated, jailhouse informants put them there 25 percent of the time. 25 percent. So a quarter of the time it's jailhouse informants.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Right. For people on death row. Who turn out to be innocent. That's exactly right. Yeah.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: But other than the jailhouse informant and the eyewitnesses, there was zero, nothing connecting Ben to the crime. There weren't fingerprints. There wasn't blood. Police never found the victim's stolen property at Ben's house when they searched it. They never even found a murder weapon. And Ben actually had an alibi, a friend who said she was with him when Jeffrey Young was attacked several miles away. But no one believed her.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And this brings us to the other thing that's really common in wrongful convictions. And that's this phenomenon called tunnel vision.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Here's how Daryl Parker described it. He's a former cop who became a private investigator. It's a known phenomenon among investigators and police, and it's that investigators and police are so driven to catch the person that just did this heinous crime that they find someone, they focus on them to the exclusion of all others. And then they start making the evidence fit their theory instead of making their theory fit the evidence.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like human nature, but obviously that's a lot stacked against Ben. You know, you've got the tunnel vision, the jailhouse informants, this reward money. And then we can't ignore the fact that you have power and you have race involved in this as well.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: You're absolutely right. And on October 31st of 1987, Ben Spencer was convicted of murder.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So the worst outcome for Ben, it just seems so wild that based on a few people saying something, you could be convicted of murder.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Yeah, yeah. But remember, this is Dallas, 1987. And back then black men almost always faced all-white juries and the view of the police was often that, gosh, if this black suspect didn't commit this particular crime, well, he committed another, so we might as well just put him in prison, get him off the streets. And there was a sense that I heard over and over again that any black man will do.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, obviously that's a part of how Ben ended up in prison.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Can I ask you, did Ben have a decent lawyer?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, in fact, he did. He was appointed a lawyer who was actually quite reputable at the time.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: The problem was the lawyer only presented an alibi defense. And honestly, alibi defenses never work. They never work. And in this case, it did not work.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then Ben ends up in prison.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Well, actually, not right away.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Oh, OK. OK. What happened?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So he ended up in prison right away? Not right away. The conviction was vacated.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: OK, so the whole thing was thrown out because of something Ben's lawyer discovered.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: While they were waiting for the jury to decide the sentence.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: More after the break. Stay with us.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from BetterHelp. President Fernando Madeira describes how BetterHelp online therapy has helped him.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: For me, sometimes I just need to go and talk to somebody that is not going to judge me, right? Is going to be there and they're going to listen to me. And I can start just saying, look, I'm not feeling right today. And it feels natural. I love it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: To get matched with a therapist, visit betterhelp.com slash NPR for 10% off your first month.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from Lisa. Lisa mattresses are meticulously designed and assembled in the USA for exceptional quality.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And each mattress is designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. Plus, they back it all up with free shipping, easy returns, and a 100-night sleep trial.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Visit Lisa.com for 25% off mattresses, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code NPR.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's L-E-E-S-A dot com, promo code NPR.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor AARP.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Where do you see your career in 12 years? What are you doing now to help you get there?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The sooner you start enhancing your skills, the sooner you'll be ready. That's why AARP has management, finance, and small business reskilling courses, all to help your income live as long as you do.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Because the steps you choose to take today will help you love what you do in the future. Learn more at aarp.org slash skills.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Support for NPR and the following message come from USPS.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Did you know USPS Ground Advantage Service keeps your business in the know from dock to delivery and everywhere in between?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Keep your business in the know at USPS.com slash in the know.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with the Sunday story, talking to Barbara Bradley Haggerty about Ben Spencer.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Ben's just been convicted of murder, but the judge throws out the case.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So, Barbara, like, what happened?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Well, Aisha, this case is full of twists, okay? While the jury's considering what sentence to hand down, a lawyer on Ben's defense team looks over at the prosecutor's table and notices a document. It's a receipt from Crime Stoppers.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: If you'll remember, Crime Stoppers is a community-based organization that allows people to make anonymous tips and pays for them if they pan out.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So the document on the prosecutor's desk showed that the star witness against Ben, Gladys Oliver, had received some money in exchange for identifying Ben.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Gladys Oliver said she didn't receive any money at all from any source, but she did. She received money from Crimestoppers.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And I should note, spoiler alert here, I should note that decades later we discovered Gladys also received thousands of dollars from Ross Perot. At that point, we didn't know that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But here's the problem with the Crime Stoppers reward. If the jury had known that she was receiving any money, Ben's attorneys could have used that information to undercut her credibility.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So basically, the witness lied and the prosecutor knew it because they had the receipt.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So does that happen often?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: It happens all the time. It even has a name. It's called a Brady violation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So studies show that when someone is wrongly convicted and later exonerated, the police and prosecutors were involved in misconduct 60% of the time.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So more than half the cases, there's prosecutorial or police misconduct.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In Ben's case, the judge looked at the fact that Gladys had lied and he vacated the conviction.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And at this point, you know, the state decides, OK, we're going to just try him again.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Before the second trial, a prosecutor offers Ben a deal. He says, look, if you plead guilty to aggravated robbery, a lesser charge, we will ask for less time and you'll be out in two or three years.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And Ben told me later what he thought of that offer. I think it was the Friday before the second trial began. And Frank Jackson, who was my attorney at the time, he comes and talks to me in his holdover.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And he was like, you know, the state is offering you a 20-year deal, non-aggravated 20 years if you'll sign for it.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And I said, sign for it? For what? I said, I didn't do anything.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He was saying, well, you know, if you take it to trial, they're going to try to give you a life sentence, they're likely to get it.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And so I'm like, well, I don't care what they're likely to get. I said, I'm not going to plead guilty to something I didn't do.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So he went back on trial again.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Yep. He went to trial, and this time he got just what his attorney had predicted, a life sentence.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, that's why people often take deals, whether they're guilty or not. It's called the trial penalty.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Yeah. So, you know, if you plead guilty, you get a lesser sentence. If you go to trial and lose, you get a really high sentence. And that's what happened with Ben.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So Ben's attorney, Frank Jackson, told me that in a way he kind of saw the sentence as almost inevitable.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: It's hard to overcome a dead white guy, a white person, who's killed by two black men in a black area of Dallas where you dump his body out on the street. It's just hard to overcome that kind of emotional case.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, no, I can only imagine how that probably, you know, affected the jury.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: But how did Ben take this?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, I asked him that 30 years later, and here's what he told me.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Well, to be honest, after I was sentenced to life, I could not see that. And that night the trial was over kind of late. I was the only one on the floor at the time. I was the only one in the holdover.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And it's cold.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And to be honest, I really want to die. I thought about committing suicide while I was in the holdover.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I start thinking about I mean I have my faith I have my belief
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And I was like well if I die if I kill myself I can go to heaven you know
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And so that was the only hope I had was I didn't want to go to hell you know
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So I was like, well, you know, I didn't commit this offense. The truth is eventually going to come out. You know, I mean, even there, he's, you know, leaning on his faith.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Where was Ben sent to serve out his sentence?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So he was sent to the largest maximum security prison in Texas. It's called the Coffield Unit.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And he doesn't really like to talk about this time.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: But standing back for a second, this was a really interesting time for crime and punishment. Things were changing so quickly.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I'll quote Charles Dickens here. It was basically the best of times and the worst of times.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And so when you say the best of times and the worst of times, what do you mean?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So soon after Ben was sentenced, the 1980s turned into the 1990s, right? And the 1990s were really a pivotal decade.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: On the one hand, it's a decade of getting really tough on crime. You'll remember the first three strikes, your outlaw was passed in 1993.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When you commit a third violent crime, you will be put away and put away for good. Three strikes and you are out.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Bill Clinton pushed through two really tough crime bills in 1994 and 1996.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There was the crack epidemic and people like Hillary Clinton talked about super predators, which was this racist notion that gangs of young black men were roving around the cities killing without remorse.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: The kinds of kids that are called super predators, no conscience, no empathy. That theory, by the way, has since been debunked.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And on top of it all, the Supreme Court started making it really, really hard to appeal convictions.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: But on the other hand, it was the best of times, right? There was an incredible technological development that happened. The DNA revolution.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: DNA started proving beyond a doubt that people had been wrongly convicted.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And this is also the time that there was this new legal organization that was founded. It was called the Innocence Project, right?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And they used DNA to exonerate person after person after person.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: The 72-year-old was exonerated by DNA, which made history as the oldest exoneration by DNA in the United States.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Ricky Davis, who served more than 13 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: A man who spent three decades in prison for rape is cleared of the crime.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A man who spent 25 years in prison tried twice, DNA now setting him free.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And suddenly, you know, average Americans started to see how deeply flawed the criminal justice system really was.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So did Ben Spencer's attorneys, you know, did they try to jump on this bandwagon?
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And was there any DNA that they could use to get him off?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So, DNA didn't help Ben. There was no DNA in his case to test.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So Ben did appeal his conviction, but of course, Aisha, he lost.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, well, I mean, I guess that he should have had a chance on appeal.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Yeah, but here's the thing. Without DNA or some other kind of major mind-blowing evidence, appellate courts almost never, never contradict jury verdicts.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They always affirm them because they don't want to second-guess the jury.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: They're like, well, you know what? We weren't there to assess the evidence or the witnesses, so we are just going to affirm this jury verdict.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And so basically, Ben was stuck.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Did Ben just kind of give up hope at this point?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Amazingly, he did not give up hope.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: I mean, one thing was he had his faith and a belief that truth would eventually come out.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But also another prisoner gave him the name and address of a group that would reinvestigate dubious convictions.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: Now, this was before the Innocence Project.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Do you remember we talked about Jim McCluskey? He's the former seminarian who, like, dedicated his life to the wrongly convicted.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: So he also got me onto this story. He had started this little nonprofit called Centurion Ministries.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And Ben began writing them.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: But Jim said, you know, it was really hard to take his case because Centurion, which was the only game in town, was flooded with hundreds of requests a year.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And this is what Jim told me. Ben first wrote us in the late 80s. We didn't take his case on until 2000. 2000!
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: 2000! That's at least 10, 11, 12 years.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Ben never complained. He kept on patiently and in detail answering our questions. He never said, woe is me.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: His focus was to get Centurion Ministries on this case.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then one day in 2001, Jim McCluskey shows up at Cofield Unit.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: He spent an hour talking to Ben through this plexiglass divide in the visitor's room, which I have seen too.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So they spent an hour together.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And this is what Jim said. I walked away thinking, we can't leave this man behind. We just can't do it. He had nothing to do with this crime.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, by this point, Ben has been in prison a long time. Like, it's amazing.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: And just now, he's getting someone to pick up his case. He was just really happy when he saw Jim McCluskey at Coffield Unit.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I would imagine things change after this. Maybe not quickly, but they change.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: That's right.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Be sure to listen to the second part of our series about Ben Spencer in which I describe the uphill battle to prove his innocence.
--:-- Barbara Bradley Haggerty: A battle fought by both Ben on the inside as well as a handful of people on the outside.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You can listen to that episode now right here in the Up First podcast feed.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor, Capella University.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Interested in a quality online education? Capella is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from Capital One.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums checking accounts.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.
--:-- [Break music continues]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Support for NPR and the following message come from Pete and Jerry's Eggs.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Their new organic pasture-raised eggs come from hens that roam lush pastures and enjoy a USDA-certified organic diet.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The result? Delicious, ethical, healthy eggs, as nature intended. Learn more at PeteAndJerrys.com.
