Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was a top middleweight boxer from Paterson, New Jersey, whose life took a hard turn in June 1966. Just two years earlier he had been within reach of the middleweight crown. After two men shot four people at the Lafayette Bar and Grill, killing three that night and a fourth later, police stopped Carter and his friend John Artis twice while they were driving home. Carter had a record, and more importantly, he had been vocal about police harassment in Black neighborhoods, which made him an easy target in the eyes of local law enforcement.

After a 17 hour interrogation and a failed attempt to get the surviving victim to identify either man, the case initially collapsed. A grand jury found no basis to charge them and both walked out free. But the police refused to let it go. With no physical evidence and no clear motive, investigators built their case on the testimony of two petty criminals who were pressured, coached, and promised deals to point the finger at Carter and Artis.

Both men were convicted, retried, and convicted again. The prosecution’s story shifted constantly, witnesses recanted, and the entire case leaned far more on fear and racial bias than on any actual facts. Appeals dragged on for years until 1985, when a federal judge finally granted Carter a writ of habeas corpus, ruling that the convictions were driven by racism and the suppression of evidence. Nearly twenty years after this photo was taken, Carter walked out of prison.

Carter spent the rest of his life working to overturn wrongful convictions and helping people trapped in the same machinery that had taken so much from him. He was a flawed, complicated man, but he and John Artis were wronged. Artis in particular is often overlooked, even though the injustice swallowed decades of his life as well. Their case is a reminder of how easily a bad investigation can derail a life and how slow justice tends to be when it finally arrives at all. If interested, I write about the case in detail here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-volume-47-rubin?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios