Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the famous and feared prizefighter from Paterson, New Jersey, who spent 19 years of his life in prison due to lying witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct, died at his home in Toronto today. He was 76. The Times reports that the cause was prostate cancer.
When he was a teenager, Carter escaped juvenile detention facilities in New Jersey to join the army, where he became a skilled boxer. After serving four years in state prison for a drunken assault he committed when he was 20, he turned to boxing again and won 27 out of 40 fights, 19 by knockout.
Carter's 1967 conviction in a triple murder that occurred the year before was prompted by the testimony of two white witnesses with long criminal records, who had cut deals with the prosecution. The Times and the New Jersey Public Defender's office later got the two men to recant, but one recanted his recantation, and Carter and his supposed accomplice were sent back to prison. Carter wouldn't be freed until 1985. In prison, Carter wrote his autobiography, and became a student of philosophy and the law. Carter was able to quell an inmate riot in 1971, and at least one prison guard credited him with saving his life.
In 2004, Carter founded Innocence International, and in February of this year, he was able to state his dying wish in the Daily News: that David McCallum, a Brooklyn man who was jailed in 1985 after his coerced confession, be released.
In his editorial, Carter was introspective:
If I find a heaven after this life, I’ll be quite surprised. In my own years on this planet, though, I lived in hell for the first 49 years, and have been in heaven for the past 28 years.
To live in a world where truth matters and justice, however late, really happens, that world would be heaven enough for us all.
