The Hurricane

aka Rubin Carter

Album cover for

Bob Dylan’s “Desire”

November 1975

In the early summer of 1966, a young Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was a top-ranked middleweight boxer whom many boxing enthusiasts expected to become world middleweight champion.

On the early morning (about 2:40 AM) of June, 17, 1966 three people were shot to death in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey.  In what the local police might call a happy coincidence, Carter and a friend named John Artis, were driving home from another club in Paterson that very evening; they were stopped by police and questioned. Although at the time police asserted that Carter nor Artis “were never suspects,” but another man named Alfred Bello, who was a suspect in the killings, claimed that Carter and Artis were present at the time of the murders. On the basis of Bello's testimony, and another man named Arthur Bradley (who supported Bello’s claim) Ruben Carter and John Artis were arrested for the murders in October of 1966.

Both were tried for the crime and both men were given three consecutive life sentences on June 29, 1967.   As is the case in many such instances, throughout the trial, Carter proclaimed his innocence, saying that his African-American race and work as a civil rights activist were the real reasons for his conviction. In short he considered his conviction to be nothing short of a ‘hate crime’ event.

Then, several years later with Carter in jail, in 1974, both Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley, the prosecutions two key witnesses, recanted their testimony, but as fate would have it, Carter and Artis were reconvicted in a second trial.

By the early 1980s, Lesra Martin, a young teenager from Brooklyn began working with a trio of Canadian activists who were trying to persuade the State of New Jersey to reinvestigate Carter's case.

Several years later in 1985, a U S Federal District Court determined that the prosecution in Carter's second trial had committed “grave constitutional violations” and that his conviction was based on racism rather than facts.

Carter was finally freed from prison in February of 1988, more than three years after the June 7, 1985 decision that he was Wrongly Convicted.    He later summed up his story by saying, “Hate got me into this place, love got me out.”

“The Hurricane” is now a movie that was released in late December of 1999 and is based on Carter's incredible true story, staring Denzel Washington as Carter.  “Hurricane” is a popular protest song recorded by none other than Bob Dylan aka Robert Zimmerman a way back in late 1975.

Sources …

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1093641-hurricane/            

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_(song)

http://www.biography.com/articles/Rubin-Carter-9542248            

http://tgsfree4allinfo.blogspot.com/2011/08/wrongly-convicted.html http://tgsfree4allinfo.blogspot.com/2011/08/robert-allen-zimmerman.html