Wundery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Suspect, Ad Free right now.

Join Woundery Plus in the Woundery app or on Apple Podcasts. Wonder.

Campside Media. When Ben Goldsmith took a manual fairs

when Ben Goldsmith took a manual affairs case in August of 2012, he knew the odds were not in his favor.

This belief was based on statistics. The vast majority of criminal charges end with a defendant pleading guilty before trial.

And a recent study estimated that more than three quarters of violent felonies that do reach a trial end with guilty verdicts.

Then there were the compounding factors.

Emmanuel Fair was a young black man in a system that has been historically and overwhelmingly unkind to young black men.

Moreover, the prosecution had presented evidence that Emmanuel Fair's DNA was in the midst of the crime scene,

and Ben and his team had not contested that

evidence they'd only sought to place it into the proper context. So when the

jury forewoman stepped forward to tell the judge she and her 11 peers were deadlocked,

Ben was relieved.

Because I felt like the jury had been out so long the chances of the coming back not guilty was just getting increasingly small.

So it was sort of a feeling of living to fight another day.

For Emmanuel, the feeling obviously was a little more complicated.

He told me recently that he considered a mistrial at first to be a win,

and he realized how far he had to go.

Man, I just felt like, honestly, I felt like And he realized how far he had to go.

Man, I've just felt like, honestly, I felt like man, I should have been going home today.

You know what I'm saying?

You know what I'm saying?

...