Bringing Ben Home

Bringing Ben Home PDF Author: Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 059342008X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
How states are making their legal systems more equitable, seen through the story of a Black man falsely imprisoned for thirty years for murder. 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 murder, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in prison. 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 prison. 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 murder, 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.

Bringing Ben Home

Bringing Ben Home PDF Author: Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 059342008X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
How states are making their legal systems more equitable, seen through the story of a Black man falsely imprisoned for thirty years for murder. 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 murder, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in prison. 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 prison. 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 murder, 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.

Bringing Down the House

Bringing Down the House PDF Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743250842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The #1 national bestseller, now a major motion picture, 21—the amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas—and lived to tell how. Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.’s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world’s most sophisticated casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.

Life Reimagined

Life Reimagined PDF Author: Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101622970
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
A dynamic and inspiring exploration of the new science that is redrawing the future for people in their forties, fifties, and sixties for the better—and for good. There’s no such thing as an inevitable midlife crisis, Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes in this provocative, hopeful book. It’s a myth, an illusion. New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be a great new adventure, when you can embrace fresh possibilities, purposes, and pleasures. In Life Reimagined, Hagerty explains that midlife is about renewal: It’s the time to renegotiate your purpose, refocus your relationships, and transform the way you think about the world and yourself. Drawing from emerging information in neurology, psychology, biology, genetics, and sociology—as well as her own story of midlife transformation—Hagerty redraws the map for people in midlife and plots a new course forward in understanding our health, our relationships, even our futures.

Fingerprints of God

Fingerprints of God PDF Author: Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594488771
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Articles about research on spirituality and the brain are usually written from the point of view that religious experience can be understood from a purely scientific perspective. Hagerty's (religion correspondent, NPR) book does not have this naturalistic or materialistic tendency. Rather, as both a reporter and a religious person, she seeks insight on spirituality and science while being open to the possibility that spirituality may still have a transcendent component. The book is interesting to read because the author has interviewed many scientists as well as many people who attest to having mystical or near-death experiences. In a way, the reader feels like a participant in Hagerty's own encounter with the various pieces of information and evidence, struggling with her to make sense of it all. Highly recommended.John Jaeger, Dallas Baptist Univ. Lib. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bringing Home the Bachelor

Bringing Home the Bachelor PDF Author: Sarah M. Anderson
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1460318374
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
In this Bolton Brothers novel, Sarah M. Anderson shows how one single mom at a bachelor auction can bring home the wildest ride of her life! Jenny Wawasuck knows that "Wild" Billy Bolton is all wrong for a good girl like her. But then she sees the bond Billy forms with her son?and feels how Billy's touch burns her skin, how his kiss ignites desires she's long ignored. So she brings him home from the charity bachelor auction. Now Billy has one night to stake his claim. But in a world filled with blackmailers and gold diggers, can a millionaire bad boy and a sweet single mom turn one chance into forever?

Bring the War Home

Bring the War Home PDF Author: Kathleen Belew
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674237692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A Guardian Best Book of the Year “A gripping study of white power...Explosive.” —New York Times “Helps explain how we got to today’s alt-right.” —Terry Gross, Fresh Air The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Returning to a country ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. The command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under President Trump. Based on a decade of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right. “A much-needed and troubling revelation... The power of Belew’s book comes, in part, from the fact that it reveals a story about white-racist violence that we should all already know.” —The Nation “Fascinating... Shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.” —Slate “Superbly comprehensive...supplants all journalistic accounts of America’s resurgent white supremacism.” —Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian

Bringing Down the House

Bringing Down the House PDF Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099468239
Category : Cardsharping
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Cheating in casinos is illegal: card-counting - making a record of what cards have so far been dealt to enable the player to make some prediction of what cards remain in the deck - is not. This book tells the true story a successful scam, in which teams of young mathematicians and physicists won millions of dollars from the casinos of Las Vegas.

Straight Flush

Straight Flush PDF Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062240110
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the film The Social Network and 21—comes the larger-than-life rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world. Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, Straight Flush tells of the company’s initial operations in the exotic jungle paradise of Costa Rica—where its founders embraced an outrageous lifestyle of girls, parties, and money—and of the gray area of U.S. and international law in which they created an industry. Soon, the U.S. Department of Justice was gunning for them… Should they fold—or double down and ride their hot hand? Impossible to put down, Straight Flush is an exclusive, never-before-seen look behind the headlines of one of the wildest business stories of the past decade.

Bringing Nature Home

Bringing Nature Home PDF Author: Douglas W. Tallamy
Publisher: Timber Press
ISBN: 1604691468
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
“With the twinned calamities of climate change and mass extinction weighing heavier and heavier on my nature-besotted soul, here were concrete, affordable actions that I could take, that anyone could take, to help our wild neighbors thrive in the built human environment. And it all starts with nothing more than a seed. Bringing Nature Home is a miracle: a book that summons butterflies." —Margaret Renkl, The Washington Post As development and habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. In his groundbreaking book Bringing Nature Home, Douglas W. Tallamy reveals the unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife—native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plants disappear, the insects disappear, impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals. Luckily, there is an important and simple step we can all take to help reverse this alarming trend: everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity by simply choosing native plants. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical and achievable recommendations, we can all make a difference.

Slow Democracy

Slow Democracy PDF Author: Susan Clark
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603584137
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Reconnecting with the sources of decisions that affect us, and with the processes of democracy itself, is at the heart of 21st-century sustainable communities. Slow Democracy chronicles the ways in which ordinary people have mobilized to find local solutions to local problems. It invites us to bring the advantages of "slow" to our community decision making. Just as slow food encourages chefs and eaters to become more intimately involved with the production of local food, slow democracy encourages us to govern ourselves locally with processes that are inclusive, deliberative, and citizen powered. Susan Clark and Woden Teachout outline the qualities of real, local decision making and show us the range of ways that communities are breathing new life into participatory democracy around the country. We meet residents who seize back control of their municipal water systems from global corporations, parents who find unique solutions to seemingly divisive school-redistricting issues, and a host of other citizens across the nation who have designed local decision-making systems to solve the problems unique to their area in ways that work best for their communities. Though rooted in the direct participation that defined our nation's early days, slow democracy is not a romantic vision for reigniting the ways of old. Rather, the strategies outlined here are uniquely suited to 21st-century technologies and culture.If our future holds an increased focus on local food, local energy, and local economy, then surely we will need to improve our skills at local governance as well.