How Did St. Louis Police Podcast Hosts Help Free a Man from Prison?

When a group of St. Louis police officers came up with the idea of a podcast revolving around cops and their stories, nobody figured that Paige Spears would someday be a featured guest.

But one Thursday last month, in the basement of Colombo’s Cafe & Tavern on Manchester Avenue where the “Brighter Side of Blue” podcast is produced, Spears sipped a soft drink and kept himself collected. He had been released from prison days earlier, thanks largely to the podcast. The basement was filled with cops who had come to watch the taping.

Spears was not an innocent man wrongly accused. He was guilty as charged. He and a pal robbed a liquor store in Ferguson in 1988. For Spears, it was his third strike. He had committed his first robbery when he was 16. He did two and a half years, came out worse than when he went in, and committed three more robberies He did six years of a 15-year sentence, and then robbed the liquor store.

A jury convicted him of first-degree robbery and armed criminal action. Judge Steven Goldman sentenced him to life in prison for the robbery and 30 years for armed criminal action.

Three strike laws were all the rage. The sentencing rated a single paragraph in the police-courts round-up of the Post-Dispatch.

So how did the podcast come to champion Spears’ cause?

That story began on Christmas Eve of 2021, when Steve James and Derrick Brookfield were victims of a street robbery in Wellston. They gave up their wallets and cell phones but were shot, anyway. Brookfield was killed. James survived but was partially paralyzed.

James has a knack for painting and came up with the idea of using photos to paint portraits of murder victims and then giving the portraits to the grieving families. Major Ron Martin of the North County Police Cooperative, who had met James during the investigation into the Wellston shooting, mentioned the portraits to John Frank, a retired sergeant from the city who produces “Brighter Side of Blue.”

James was a guest on the podcast last May. Officers delivered one of his portraits to the mother of a murder victim.

James is Spears’ half-brother, and he told Frank about Spears’ life sentence. Actually, James called Frank and patched Spears in on the call. I’m doing life and I never hurt anybody, Spears said. I see murderers come and go, he said.

Frank was caught off-guard. I don’t think we can help you, he said. We’re cops and retired cops, he said. Still, he promised to look into the case. He found several old newspaper columns. Shouldn’t it count for something that Spears never shot anybody? If you ever talk to anybody who has been on the wrong end of a gun, he or she will tell that their first thought — and it is overwhelming — is, Please don’t kill me.

The columns pointed out that there is already an incentive for robbers to shoot their victims. No witnesses. We ought to consider the message we are sending to the streets when we give a life sentence to a man who didn’t shoot.

Certain crimes demand life imprisonment. Robbery isn’t one.

Also, there was a legalistic argument. When Spears was sentenced, a life sentence meant, for parole purposes, 50 years. A subsequent law changed that number to 30, but the law was not retroactive.

Those columns did not move the needle in any way. I did get some positive feedback from a few people inside the prison administration. Spears is an example of a man who has been rehabilitated, they said. He has completed every program the system offers, and has taught most of them.

Every time somebody committed a murder and pleaded it down to manslaughter, which happens a lot, I thought of Spears.

In 2021, I heard from Spears’ longtime attorney, Herman Jimerson. (He did not handle the original trial.) There’s going to be a hearing to reduce his sentence, Jimerson said. Prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell is for it. So is former Attorney General Mike Wolff, Jimerson said. The hearing was called off at the last moment. The judge who was scheduled to hear it decided the court did not have the authority to reduce a sentence.

Some good came from the failed hearing. Spears’ family and friends had a protest outside the courthouse. Television got interested. Chris Hayes of KTVI (Fox 2) and Holden Kurwicki of KSDK ( Channel 5) did reports.

A model prisoner. A changed man.

So Frank brought the idea to his podcast mates, J.J. Joyner, Danny Howard and Tommy Sawyer. They were, of course, men who had spent their careers putting people into prison. Should they help a guilty man get out?

But they understand, perhaps more than most, the profound difference between robbery and murder. They decided to help. The only path out of prison was a commutation. Then-Gov. Mike Parson was a former sheriff. He held cops in higher regard than he did journalists.

“Lots of people reached out. They wouldn’t necessarily want their names used,” Frank told me.

Parson commuted the sentence, and Spears was paroled. Frank went to the prison in Farmington to welcome him to freedom.

I chatted with Spears at the podcast taping, and then visited him at his mother’s home in Florissant a few days later. She is 88. She was at a doctor’s appointment the day I visited.

Spears talked about rehabilitation and change. The prisons have good programs, he said, but they only work if you want them to. Real change comes from inside, he said.

He said he became a real Christian in prison, and that helped. It was actually a return, he said. His parents were churchgoers. His dad drove a garbage truck. Spears was the fifth of eight kids, and the only one who got in any serious trouble.

He’s 64, and he hopes to find work. Maybe counseling of some sort.

He said he went to a Social Security office to get a copy of his Social Security card. He lost the original years ago. The clerk told him they no longer take walk-ins, but then she relented and went to her computer.

“You’re dead,” she said.

Apparently, somebody had stolen his number during the years he was locked up, and then that person died.

I’m sure it will get worked out, Spears said.

I asked what happened to Michael Clark, his partner in the liquor store robbery. It was Clark who had the gun. They were tried together and sentenced together.

“He’s still in prison,” Spears said.

Two men were arrested for the murder of Brookfield and the shooting of James. Their cases are still pending.

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