Rubin Carter: US boxer who fought to clear his name
1937-2014
RUBIN “The Hurricane” Carter, who has died aged 76, was a US boxer and one-time contender for the world middleweight title. His biggest fight, however, was to clear his name, a campaign supported by Bob Dylan through his epic song Hurricane.
Although the case against him was weak from the outset, Carter — a handsome black boxer famed for his lightning left hook — was twice convicted (first in 1967 and on retrial in 1976) of fatally shooting two men and a woman in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey.
His fate drew the attention of many prominent civil rights activists, including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Muhammad Ali and, most prominently, Dylan.
“Here comes the story of the Hurricane,” Dylan sang, “the man the authorities came to blame, for something that he never done, put him in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been the champion of the world.”
Carter spent nearly two decades in jail until, in 1985, he was released, with both convictions quashed on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. “They can incarcerate my body,” he said before his release, “but never my mind.”
Carter was born on May 6 1937 in Clifton, New Jersey, the fourth of seven children. His upbringing was as tough as any of his bouts.
“The kindest thing I have to say about my childhood is that I survived it,” he recalled. His father, Lloyd, was a strict disciplinarian.
All of Rubin’s cards were marked in advance, the trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance
He put Carter to work at the age of eight and handed him over to the police the following year for stealing from a local store.
A series of clashes with the authorities ensued, culminating in him being placed, aged 11, in the Jamesburg State Home for Boys after he stabbed a man, allegedly in self-defence. He spent six years there before running away and joining the army.
Military service — as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division stationed in Germany — gave him stability and a passion for boxing.
On his discharge in 1957, however, he was again in trouble, serving four years in Trenton State Prison for theft and assault.
There he returned to the ring and, the day after his release in 1961, he fought for the first time as a professional.
Soon his powerful hitting was the talk of the boxing circuit. Promoters billed him as a hoodlum-turned-champ, a poster boy for prison’s potential for rehabilitation.
By the mid-1960s, he had married and was a top-drawer middleweight driving a customised Cadillac.
His life changed in the early hours of June 17 1966 when two men entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson and started shooting. The bartender and a male customer were killed instantly. A female customer died of her wounds a few weeks later. All three victims were white. Witnesses said the gunmen were black.
Carter was arrested along with a drinking friend, John Artis, despite se- rious flaws in the case against them: a witness in the bar could not identify the pair; both Artis and Carter passed lie-detector tests; the two men had sound alibi witnesses; and the two key prosecution witnesses were white burglars.
In the words of Dylan: “All of Rubin’s cards were marked in advance, the trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance.”
The two prosecution witnesses recanted their testimonies in 1976 — claiming police pressure — and a retrial was ordered, only for the original verdict to be reinstated.
Although Hurricane made the charts, further highlighting the injustice, it would take nine more years for both men’s sentences to be overturned.
After his release from prison, aged 48, Carter lived in Toronto, where he founded Innocence International, a charity that works to free prisoners wrongly convicted of crimes.
In 1999, Denzel Washington played Carter in the film The Hurricane.
Carter married first, in 1963, Mae Thelma Basket. The marriage was dissolved and he then married Lisa Peters. The couple later separated.
He is survived by a daughter and a son from his first marriage. —