Rubin Carter 1937–

Former boxer, activist

Rubin Carter was a fighter from his early days in a small New Jersey town. After several run-ins with the law, he joined the Army and developed into a champion boxer. A promising career as a professional boxer was shattered, however, when he and a friend were wrongly accused of murder and sent to prison. Over the course of two decades, Carter would fight to clear his name and regain the freedom that had been taken from him.

Carter was born on May 6, 1937 in Delawanna, New Jersey to a middle class family in a racially mixed neighborhood. His father, Lloyd, was an entrepreneur and owned several small businesses throughout Carter’s childhood. He was a deacon in the local Baptist church and a strict disciplinarian. All of the beatings that Carter received from his father did little to curb his penchant for fighting. Carter stuttered as a youth and would not suffer being teased. He beat up bullies or anyone else who made fun of him. Carter was expelled from school for fighting with a teacher who he felt was mistreating his sister. He even punched the local preacher. At the age of nine, Carter stole some new clothes and gave them to his brothers and sisters. His father saw the new clothes and, after beating his son, turned him in to the police.

Carter continued to have brushes with the law and, after he and three other boys attacked a man and stole his watch, was convicted of robbery and assault. He was sent to the Jamesburg Home for Boys and stayed there for two years until he escaped. To avoid the authorities, Carter joined the Army. He endured the hideous physical punishment of paratrooper training and became a member of the elite Army unit. While stationed in Germany, he learned to box at the Army’s fieldhouse. His first fight, which he was goaded into after he had been drinking, came against the Army’s heavyweight champ. Using borrowed boots and gloves, Carter knocked out the heavyweight champ. He was immediately transferred to a special service for boxers.

In his first year, Carter compiled a 35-5 record and won the European Lightweight Championship. He began going to classes—including a Dale Carnegie class, which helped him to conquer his stuttering problem. He even adopted Islam and changed his name for a while. Carter was discharged from the Army on May 29, 1956, and was arrested less than a month later for his escape from Jamesburg Home for Boys. He went to Annandale prison for five months, was arrested again for robbery and assault, and spent time in the

At a Glance…

Born Rubin Carter, May 6, 1937 in Delawanna, NJ; son of Lloyd Carter (an entrepreneur); children: Theodora and Raheem.

Career: Joined the Army and became a boxer, 1954; arrested for assault and robbery and spent four years in prison until his release, 1961; lost middleweight championship bout, 1964; tried and convicted of a triple homicide, 1966; released from prison after the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned the conviction, 1976; retried and sent to prison, 1976; freed from prison, 1985; charges are officially dropped, 1988; the movie based on Carter’s life, The Hurricane, is released, 1999.

Awards: European Lightweight Champion, 1956;

Addresses: Residence —Toronto, Canada; Office —c/o The Association of the Wrongly Convicted, 155 Delaware Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Rahway and Trenton state prisons until his release in September of 1961. During his four years in prison, he rededicated himself to boxing, training, and lifting weights. When he emerged from prison and became a professional boxer, Carter established himself as a brutal competitor. He fought for the middleweight title in 1963 after knocking out Emile Griffith in two minutes and 13 seconds of the first round. Carter lost his championship bid in December of 1964 in a close bout with champion Joey Giardello. After the Giardello bout, Carter finished out his career at 7-7-1 with an overall record of 28 wins, 11 losses, and one draw.

The Ominous Night

Carter was married in 1963 and soon after he and his wife, Mae Thelma, had a daughter named Theodora. On the night of June 16, 1966, after watching television with his daughter, Carter decided to go out for the night. He went out to a bar called the Nite Spot, and met an ex-sparring partner who Carter believed had stolen three guns from his last training camp. Carter took the man to look for the guns, but could not find them nor confirm that the man had stolen from him. He returned to the bar and stayed until last call at 2:00 A.M. Carter didn’t want to go home, but had run out of money. He asked a 19-year-old at the bar to drive him home to get more money. The young man, John Artis, agreed to drive Carter home along with a local drifter named John Royster.

Earlier in the evening, two African American men had entered the Lafayette Grill through the side door. One of the men carried a shotgun, and immediately killed the bartender. The other man, who was carrying a pistol, killed a patron at the bar and wounded another man and a woman. The police believed that the killing was an act of racial retaliation for the murder of an African American bartender by a white man earlier in the evening.

During the search for the two gunmen, Carter, Artis, and Royster were stopped by the police. One of the policemen knew Carter, and the three men were released almost immediately. Carter stopped home, picked up more money, and the trio set out again. After driving around for awhile, the men decided to call it a night. Artis dropped off Royster first and then, on the way to Carter’s house, the police stopped the car. This time, the police acted very differently. Carter and Artis were taken to the Lafayette Grill and put up against the wall while the car was searched. They were then taken to the hospital. The police showed Carter and Artis to one of the shooting victims, who told police that neither man had shot him. The two men were then taken to the police department and held for 16 hours. Both men were questioned, passed lie detector tests, and were released. The next day, the assistant county prosecutor denied that Carter had ever been a suspect. Believing that the matter was settled, Carter left for Argentina to fight in his next bout.

On October 14, 1966, Carter was picked up by the police and charged with the murders at the Lafayette Grill. Prosecutors now had two witnesses who claimed that they saw Carter and Artis fleeing the scene of the crime. One of the witnesses, Alfred Bello, was an ex-convict who had been questioned on the night of the murders. Originally, Bello had told the police that he did not see who committed the shootings. The shooting victim who had seen Carter and Artis in the hospital, William Marins, had also changed his story and identified Carter and Artis as the perpetrators. There was conflicting evidence about the getaway car, and the police department failed to collect fingerprints or conduct paraffin tests on Carter or Artis to see if they had fired any weapons. Bello took the stand, and said that he saw a white Dodge with three men in it. He then heard shots, and saw Carter and Artis leave the bar laughing—one with a shotgun and another with a pistol. Bello also admitted that moments after the murders, he entered the bar and took money out of the cash register. Despite the numerous contradictions, inconsistencies, and the unreliable nature of the prosecution’s witnesses, the jury took less than two hours to convict Carter and Artis on three counts of murder.

Back to Prison

Carter was returned to Trenton State Prison, were he had previously served five years. He refused to wear prison clothes or shave, and swore that he would kill any prison official who touched him. Carter was immediately sent to solitary confinement, and remained there until doctors found a detached retina on his right eye. He had an operation in prison and, instead of fixing the old boxing injury, the operation left him blind in one eye. Although Carter was released from solitary confinement, he still refused to work or wear a striped prison uniform. Younger prisoners gave him food, which he ate in his cell. He also refused to attend his own parole hearings.

After losing his first appeal before the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1969, Carter was transferred to Rahway State Prison. He became a leader among the inmates and wrote his autobiography entitled The Sixteenth Round: From Number One Contender to Number 45472. Thanks to the efforts of an investigator from the public defenders office, Fred Hogan, Carter’s case was receiving attention in the media. Hogan, who knew Carter as a boxer, told Dave Anderson of The New York Times about his involvement in the case: “I knew in my heart that there was no way that Rubin did that. And the more Rubin told me about the trial, the more I knew it stunk.” Hogan gathered his own evidence, and even interviewed the state’s key witnesses. He turned over all of his findings to Selwyn Raab, a reporter for the New York Times. In an article published on September 27, 1974, in the New York Times, both Bello and the government’s other key witness admitted that they had lied under oath. Carter hired a public relations man to publicize his case to the media. He became a cause-celebre during the mid-1970s, and even appeared on television shows. Carter was also the subject of an eight-minute-and-33-second epic written and performed by Bob Dylan called “Hurricane.” After the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned their conviction by a 7-0 vote, Carter and Artis were released from prison. Despite his newfound freedom, Carter was not happy: he had lost an eye, he had spent another vast period of his life in prison, and the Passaic County prosecutor vowed to send him back to jail.

By the fall of 1976, Carter’s fortunes had suffered another drastic setback. He was in debt, his family was on welfare, and key supporters were being driven away by infighting and other issues. Carter was even accused of assaulting one of his most stalwart advocates, former parole officer Carolyn Kelly. Kelly claimed that Carter had beaten her and threatened to kill her. He denied the charge, and claimed that Kelly was taking her revenge for being rejected romantically. This was only the beginning of the bad news, however. Carter and Artis were retried for the murders at the Lafayette Grill. After another racially charged trial, the two men were again found guilty. Carter was sent back to prison and, in December of 1976, his son Raheem was born.

Carter spent four more years behind bars before appearing at a prosecutorial misconduct hearing in 1981. All of the witnesses repeated their testimonies from the earlier trials. Alfred Bello, the state’s star witness in both trials, conceded that he had a serious alcohol problem and remembered very little about the night in question. Carter appeared disinterested with the hearing. Instead, he read philosophy and concentrated on finding inner peace.

Around this time, Carter struck up a friendship with Lesra Martin, a 15-year-old teenage boy from Brooklyn who lived with a commune in Toronto. Martin was encouraged to contact and visit Carter by members of the commune. He visited Carter in prison and, when he related the details of his visit to his fellow commune members, they took up Carter’s cause with enthusiasm. The group and its leader, Lisa Peters, sent him gifts of food, clothing, and a television set. Peters and Carter grew close, sometimes conversing on the phone for up to eight hours at a time. Although the commune members had helped Carter legally, materially, and emotionally, he began to feel somewhat trapped by their worshipful attention. When members of the commune suggested that Carter move to Canada and join the commune after his release from prison, he broke off his relationship with Peters and her group. However, by the end of 1983, Carter and Peters had reestablished their relationship. She and two other commune members even moved to New Jersey to be closer to him.

Carter and his legal team, which included commune members Terry Swinton and Sam Chaiton, decided to go through federal court and ask for habeas corpus relief. His lawyers filed the writ on February 13, 1985, after three months of work. From the beginning, Judge H. Lee Sarokin rejected the racial revenge theory around which the prosecution had based their case against Carter. Despite this positive development, Carter remained in prison.

On November 7, 1985, Judge Sarokin ruled that the State of New Jersey had violated the constitutional rights of Carter and Artis on two occasions. First, the state failed to make public the results of the lie detector test which it had given to its star witness, Alfred Bello. Secondly, by using the racial revenge theory as the basis for its case, the state appealed to racial prejudice and violated Carter and Artis’s equal protection and due process rights. Following the judge’s ruling, Carter was released without bond to await his next legal hurdle.

Before Christmas of 1985, the prosecutor’s office again tried to put Carter behind bars. The Third Circuit Court ruled against the prosecution, but Carter was sufficiently threatened. Motions and appeals were filed throughout 1986, and investigators from Passaic County tried to visit Carter at his home. In August of 1987, the prosecution lost another appeal to a three-judge panel. Despite yet another loss, the prosecutor’s office pushed to have the case heard before the Supreme Court. After the Supreme Court ruled that it wouldn’t hear the case, the prosecution had no other recourse. On February 19, 1988, a State Superior Court judge dismissed all charges against Carter and Artis.

After his release from prison, Carter lived with the commune members in Canada who had helped free him from prison. He was briefly thrown out of the commune, but returned in 1989 when he developed tuberculosis. Carter and Peters were married, but only so that he could receive a more official status in Canada. Carter lived with the commune until early 1994, and left the group after he could no longer conform to the commune’s strict rules. In late 1999 the movie The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington, was released. The film whitewashed Carter’s earlier troubles with the law, deleted key parts of his story, and invented characters to further dramatize Carter’s life. One of the movie’s producers, Rudy Langlais, defended the film and claimed to Matthew Purdy of the New York Times that “The Rubin Carter case is part of the myth, part of the sacred history of New Jersey.” However Selwyn Raab, the reporter who originally brought Carter’s case to the attention of the media in 1974, wrote in the New York Times that the truth was much more frightening that any Hollywood recreation: “The actual story…exposes an underlying frailty in the criminal-justice system that convicted Mr. Carter not once but twice. The convictions were obtained not by a lone, malevolent investigator but by a network of detectives, prosecutors and judges who countenanced the suppression of evidence and the injection of racial bias into the courtroom.”

Carter still lives in Canada, and serves as the executive director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted. He travels around North America working to eliminate the death penalty. Carter also devotes his energies to furthering the cause of prisoners’ rights.