Innocent Born Guilty

I speak to Leon Benson, aka El Bently 448, who I first heard his story on Josh Rivers’ podcast, Busy Being Black.

Leon’s story moved me so much; today, I still forget how interconnected we can all be. We connected on social media, and we started to talk. Leon Benson spent two and half decades in Prison, ten of which were in solitary confinement, for a crime he did not commit. 

Last year, I started to read about Palestine and the people of Gaza, which has been referred to as an open-air prison, but this concept has been challenged because a prison implies that the people in a prison have done something wrong. Whatever your political views and beliefs are, the majority of the population in Gaza are children. They have committed no crime other than the identity thrust onto them. 

Speaking to Leon, I felt a sense of nervousness and humility. What is it like to be wrongfully convicted, to be shut away? 

Benson was freed in 2023, thanks to a team of professors from the University of San Francisco School of Law: Lara Bazelon, director of the Racial Justice Clinic, Charlie Nelson Keever, Kolleen Bunch, the sister of the murder victim Kasey Schoen, Kelly Bauder, co-director of the Marion County Indiana, Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Review Unit and Shannon Coleman, who became a self-described truth warrior after a man was wrongfully convicted of her great aunt’s murder. 

I’m not a citizen of the United States of America, though I have lived and worked in New York City since 2012 and have learned how intertwined the world is. I have seen and learned about structures of slavery, the Civil War, the post-reconstruction era, and the Jim Crow, but did I really understand the history beyond dates and names? What exactly is Jim Crow? 

Leon shared with me the book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, and helped me understand the extended structures of injustice, a form of neo-slavery and segregation that continues before us. What parallels does the story of Leon share with my own experiences and observations? 

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