Rubin Carter

In 2019, the case was the focus of a 13-part BBC podcast series, The Hurricane Tapes. The series was based on interviews which were conducted with survivors, case notes which were taken during the original investigations, and 40 hours of recorded interviews which were conducted with Carter by the author Ken Klonsky who cited them in his 2011 book The Eye of the Hurricane.

Valentine lived above the bar, and heard the shots; like Bello, she reported seeing two black men leave the bar, then get into a white car. They reportedly described it as white, with "a geometric design, sort of a butterfly type design in the back of the car", and New York state license plates, with blue background and orange lettering. Another neighbor, Ronald Ruggiero, also heard the shots, and said that, from his window, he saw Alfred Bello running west on Lafayette Street toward 16th Street. He then heard the screech of tires and saw a white car shoot past, heading west, with two black males in the front seat.

Despite the difficulties of prosecuting a ten-year-old case, Prosecutor Burrell Ives Humphreys decided to try Carter and Artis again. To ensure, as best he could, that he did not use perjured testimony to obtain a conviction, Humphreys had Bello polygraphed—once by Leonard H. Harrelson and a second time by Richard Arther, both well-known and respected experts in the field. Both men concluded that Bello was telling the truth when he said that he had seen Carter outside the Lafayette immediately after the murders.

Carter often served as a motivational speaker. On October 14, 2005, he received two honorary Doctorates of Law, one from York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and one from Griffith University (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), in recognition of his work with AIDWYC and the Innocence Project. Carter received the Abolition Award from Death Penalty Focus in 1996.

In 1996, Carter, then 59, was arrested when Toronto police mistakenly identified him as a suspect in his thirties believed to have sold drugs to an undercover officer. He was released after the police realized their error.

Carter's career record in boxing was 27 wins, 12 losses, and one draw in 40 fights, with 19 total knockouts (8 KOs and 11 TKOs). He received an honorary championship title belt from the World Boxing Council in 1993 (as did Joey Giardello at the same banquet) and was later inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame.

Having dropped off Royster, Carter was now being driven home by Artis; they were stopped again at 3:00 AM, and ordered to follow the police to the station, where they were arrested. However, variances in descriptions given by Valentine and Bello, the physical characteristics of the attackers provided by the two survivors, lack of forensic evidence, and the timeline provided by the police were key factors in the conviction being overturned in 1985.

Artis was paroled in 1981. Carter's attorneys continued to appeal. In 1982, the Supreme Court of New Jersey affirmed his convictions (4–3). Although the justices felt that the prosecutors should have disclosed Harrelson's oral opinion (about Bello's location at the time of the murders) to the defense, only a minority thought this was material. The majority thus concluded that the prosecution had not withheld information the Brady disclosure law required them to provide to the defense.

Forensics later established the victims were shot by a .32-caliber pistol and a 12-gauge shotgun, although the weapons themselves have never been found. There was no forensic evidence linking Carter or Artis to the murders; while gun residue tests were commonly used, DeSimone, the lead detective, later claimed he had no time to bring in an expert. He did arrange for an expert to conduct lie detector tests, which they passed; in 1976, a second report was discovered, claiming they failed. After 17 hours of interrogation, they were released. Carter and Artis voluntarily appeared before a grand jury, which found there was no case to answer.

Valentine initially stated the car had rear lights which lit up completely like butterflies; at the retrial in 1975, she changed this to an accurate description of Carter's car, which had conventional tail-lights with aluminum decoration in a butterfly shape. This aligned with that provided by Bello; the prosecution later suggested the confusion was the result of a misreading of a court transcript by the defense.

Carter's autobiography, titled The Sixteenth Round, written while he was in prison, was published in 1974 by Viking Press. The story inspired the 1975 Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" and the 1999 film The Hurricane (with Denzel Washington playing Carter). From 1993 to 2005, Carter served as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (later rebranded as Innocence Canada).

Despite Larner's ruling, Madison Avenue advertising executive George Lois organized a campaign on Carter's behalf, which led to increasing public support for a retrial or pardon. Muhammad Ali lent his support to the campaign (including publicly wishing Carter good luck on his appeal during the airing of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on September 7, 1973). Bob Dylan co-wrote (with Jacques Levy) and performed a song called "Hurricane" (1975), which declared that Carter was innocent. On December 7, 1975, Dylan performed the song at a concert at Trenton State Prison, where Carter was temporarily an inmate.

Carter and Artis were interrogated for 17 hours, released, then re-arrested weeks later. In 1967, they were convicted of all three murders, and given life sentences, served in Rahway State Prison; a retrial in 1976 upheld their sentences, but it was overturned in 1985. Prosecutors declined to try the case a third time after their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed.

In 1966, Carter, and his co-accused, John Artis, were arrested for a triple homicide which was committed at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. Shortly after the killings at 2:30 am, a car, which contained Carter, Artis and a third acquaintance, was stopped by police outside the bar while its occupants were on their way home from a nearby nightclub. They were allowed to go on their way, but after dropping off the third man, Carter and Artis were stopped while they were passing the bar a second time, 45 minutes later, and both of them were arrested.

After that fight, Carter's ranking in The Ring began to decline. He fought nine times in 1965, winning five but losing three of four against contenders Luis Manuel Rodríguez, Dick Tiger, and Harry Scott. Tiger, in particular, floored Carter three times in their match. "It was", Carter said, "the worst beating that I took in my life—inside or outside the ring". During his visit to London to fight Scott, Carter was involved in an incident in which a shot was fired in his hotel room.

He fought six times in 1963, winning four bouts and losing two. He remained ranked in the lower part of the top 10 until December 20, when he surprised the boxing world by flooring past and future world champion Emile Griffith twice in the first round and scoring a technical knockout. That win resulted in The Ring' s ranking of Carter as the number three contender for Joey Giardello's world middleweight title. Carter won two more fights (one a decision over future heavyweight champion Jimmy Ellis) in 1964, before meeting Giardello in Philadelphia for a 15-round championship match on December 14. Carter landed a few solid rights to the head in the fourth that left Giardello staggering, but was unable to follow them up, and Giardello took control of the fight in the fifth round. The judges awarded Giardello a unanimous decision.

After his release from prison in September 1961, Carter became a professional boxer. At 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m), Carter was shorter than the average middleweight, but he fought all of his professional career at 155–160 lb (70–72.6 kg). His aggressive style and punching power (resulting in many early-round knockouts) drew attention, establishing him as a crowd favorite and earning him the nickname "Hurricane". After he defeated a number of middleweight contenders—such as Florentino Fernandez, Holley Mims, Gomeo Brennan, and George Benton—the boxing world took notice. The Ring first listed him as one of its "Top 10" middleweight contenders in July 1963. At the end of 1965, they ranked him as the number five middleweight.

Carter was born in Clifton, New Jersey, the fourth of seven children. He later admitted to a troubled relationship with his father, a strict disciplinarian; at the age of eleven, he was sentenced to a juvenile reformatory for assault, having stabbed a man, who he claimed had tried to sexually assault him. Carter escaped from the reformatory in 1954 and joined the United States Army. A few months after completing infantry basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he was sent to West Germany. While in Germany, Carter began to box for the Army. He was later discharged in 1956 as unfit for service, after four courts-martial. Shortly after his discharge, he returned home to New Jersey, was convicted of two muggings and sent to prison.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (May 6, 1937 – April 20, 2014) was an American-Canadian middleweight boxer, wrongfully convicted of murder and later released following a petition of habeas corpus after serving almost 20 years in prison.