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[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

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On 6 July 2007 Steve Mcgonigle of The Dallas Morning News reported “DA opposes new trial for man claiming wrongful conviction”

He said Watkins defends the 1987 case. A 20-year-old armed robbery is giving District Attorney Craig Watkins a chance to defend the work of predecessors whom he regularly blames for a ruthless philosophy that gave Dallas prosecutors a reputation for unfair play. Despite lobbying by prisoner advocacy groups, Mr. Watkins is opposing a new trial for a former West Dallas resident who claims he was wrongly convicted in a 1987 robbery that resulted in the beating death of a clothing company executive. Mr. Watkins said Thursday that a lengthy private reinvestigation of the case has not convinced him that Benjamin John Spencer was a victim of mistaken identity or that another West Dallas man with a history of violent assaults is the true culprit.

"We are of the opinion that he is the right person, and we are going to defend the verdict," Mr. Watkins said.

Mr. Watkins' chance to uphold the conviction will come at an evidentiary hearing before state District Judge Rick Magnis that is scheduled to begin July 24. Judge Magnis, a career public defender who took the bench in January, did what two other judges were unwilling to do when he agreed Tuesday to allow Mr. Spencer's defense a full airing of evidence it has spent almost seven years collecting. Both sides will be able to subpoena witnesses, and the judge has ordered a re-examination of all fingerprint evidence. He has also consented to accompany attorneys on a nighttime visit to evaluate lighting conditions near a key crime scene.

If Judge Magnis recommends a new trial, his ruling would be forwarded to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin for final approval.

Defense arguments

The defense argues that three eyewitnesses could not have accurately identified Mr. Spencer as one of two men seen exiting the robbery victim's car because of their distance from the vehicle and dim lighting conditions on the moonless night. Jim McCloskey, president of Centurion Ministries Inc. and the lead private investigator in Mr. Spencer's case, argued that no one who views the lighting conditions could remain convinced the identifications are credible. "That's our DNA in this case," Mr. McCloskey said Thursday. Mr. McCloskey, along with defense attorney Cheryl Wattley and Joyce Ann Brown, founder of a Dallas advocacy group to free the wrongly convicted, made their pitch for Mr. Spencer's innocence during a meeting with Mr. Watkins in March. While he praised the group's credibility, Mr. Watkins said he came away from their presentation unconvinced that Mr. Spencer deserved a new trial. "It was kind of like junk science to me," he said. "There was nothing there that really gave me pause to think that the person didn't commit the crime."

Mr. Spencer was a 23-year-old warehouse worker on probation for joyriding when he was arrested in March 1987 for the aggravated robbery and murder of Jeffrey Young, the owner of a small wholesale clothing distributor. Mr. Young, 33, was savagely beaten and his body dumped onto a West Dallas street several blocks from where his late-model BMW was found in an alley. Three neighborhood residents identified Mr. Spencer and a second man, Robert Mitchell, as the two men they saw emerge from inside Mr. Young's car. Their testimony helped convince juries in separate trials to ignore alibis offered by Mr. Spencer and Mr. Mitchell and convict them of robbery charges. Mr. Mitchell received 35 years in prison. Mr. Spencer was sentenced to life. Mr. Spencer, who turns 43 this year, was denied parole in May. He won't be eligible again until 2012.

Mr. Mitchell died in 2003, about four months after winning his release on parole. In September 2004, Ms. Wattley, a veteran civil rights attorney and former federal prosecutor, filed a voluminous petition seeking a new trial for Mr. Spencer. In it, she blamed the conviction on faulty identifications and an ineffective defense. The petition also offered sworn statements from two parolees who said a close friend, Michael Hubbard, had confessed to them that he robbed and killed Mr. Young to obtain money to feed a voracious crack cocaine habit. Mr. Hubbard is serving a life sentence for a string of unrelated holdups dubbed the "bat man" robberies because of the baseball bat used to beat the victims. He has denied to prosecutors that he was involved in Mr. Young's death.

More than a year after Ms. Wattley filed her petition, then-District Attorney Bill Hill filed a response defending the appropriateness of Mr. Spencer's conviction and dismissing the defense's evidence as unbelievable or insufficient.

'Didn't make sense'

Mr. Watkins, who succeeded Mr. Hill in January, said he made his decision to oppose Mr. Spencer's new trial request based on his own review of the case file. "I just didn't see anything that tended to show the person didn't commit the crime," he said. "There were a lot of theories. But based upon the evidence that I saw, those theories just didn't make sense to me." Mr. Watkins, a former defense attorney, has drawn national publicity during his first few months in office for announcing that righting wrongful convictions would be a priority for his office. He has participated in two exonerations and partnered with the Innocence Project of Texas to review hundreds of prisoner petitions for genetic testing. In April, he persuaded Dallas County commissioners to provide $360,000 to staff a new section of his office devoted to "conviction integrity." He has made one of his chief goals the restoration of credibility to his office that he contends was lost through a win-at-all-costs philosophy of his predecessors. But not every case is deserving of exoneration, he said.

6 July 2007 Steve Mcgonigle The Dallas Morning News Dallas: “DA opposes new trial for man claiming wrongful conviction”

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