Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (May 6, 1937 – April 20, 2014) was an American middleweight boxer who was wrongly convicted of murder and later freed via a petition of habeas corpus after spending almost 20 years in prison.The middleweight title contender, whose murder convictions became an international symbol of racial injustice and inspired a Bob Dylan song and a Hollywood film. He undersood life though the words — “Hate put me in prison, but love’s gonna bust me out.”
Carter, who had suffered from prostate cancer, died on Easter Sunday at the age of 76. From 1993 to 2005, Carter served as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.
In 1966, police arrested Carter for a triple-homicide in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey . Police stopped Carter’s car and brought him and another occupant, John Artis, to the scene of the crime. There was little physical evidence. Police took no fingerprints at the crime scene and lacked the facilities to conduct a paraffin test for gunshot residue. None of the eyewitnesses identified Carter or Artis as the shooters. Carter and Artis were tried and convicted twice (1967 and 1976) for the murders, but after the second conviction was overturned in 1985, prosecutors chose not to try the case for a third time.
Carter’s autobiography, titled The Sixteenth Round , was published in 1975 by Warner Books. The story inspired the 1975 Bob Dylan song “Hurricane” and the 1999 film The Hurricane (with Denzel Washington playing Carter).
