Collection F0786 - Rubin “Hurricane” Carter collection

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was an American middleweight boxer who, alongside New Jersey resident John Artis, was wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a triple homicide.

In the early morning of June 17, 1966, two men entered the Lafayette Bar & Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire, killing two and injuring two others, one of whom would later die of their injuries. All victims were white, and according to witness testimony, the shooters were Black.

The same night, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis were driving home from a club when they were pulled over by police on two separate occasions. On the second, they were taken in by police and interrogated about the crime for 17 hours before being released. They were eventually indicted on three charges of first-degree murder, and their first joint trial began in April 1967.

While there was no physical evidence linking them to the crime, they were arrested based on the witness testimony of Alfred Bello, who claimed he saw Carter and Artis at the scene of the crime, and of Patricia Valentine, who lived above the Lafayette Bar, heard the shooting take place, and claimed that she saw two Black men jump into a white car which was said to match the description of Rubin Carter’s car. Carter and Artis were sentenced to life in prison for the deaths at the Lafayette Bar.

In 1974, Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley would recant their testimony, which set in motion a series of events that led to a second trial in 1976. Bello would later retract this recantation. The second trial in 1976 brought forth the theory of racial revenge, where the prosecution argued that the crime committed by Carter and Artis was a form of a racial revenge — on the same day as the shooting at the Lafayette bar, a Black bartender was killed by a white gunman. The second trial also resulted in a life sentence for both Carter and Artis.

In the early 1980s, a young man named Lesra Martin, born in Brooklyn and living in a commune in Toronto to attend school, read Carter’s book The Sixteenth Round: from Number 1 Contender to #45472 (1974) and shared it with members of the commune he lived with. Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton were among this group.

Inspired by Carter’s story, Chaiton, Swinton, and others in the commune moved to New Jersey to work on Carter’s case. They compiled material from the past two trials and assisted Carter’s attorneys with filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus (a report made to the court in the event of an unlawful detention or imprisonment with the goal being to determine whether a detention is lawful). In November 1985, it was determined by Judge Lee Sarokin that Carter was wrongfully convicted, and he was released. John Artis had already been released from prison, having served his sentences concurrently. His name was also cleared with the grant of the writ of habeas corpus.

Judge Sarokin would note that Carter’s verdict was based upon “racism rather than reason and concealment rather than disclosure.” The material collected by “the Canadians” (as they were referred to in Chaiton and Swinton's book, Lazarus and the Hurricane: The Freeing of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter) forms the Rubin “Hurricane” Carter collection and includes their investigative and legal notes.

After his release, Carter moved to Toronto, Ontario with Chaiton and Swinton. Carter began work to prove the innocence of other wrongly convicted individuals in Canada. He co-founded (along with Chaiton, Swinton, and several lawyers) the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (now known as Innocence Canada), serving for over a decade as their Executive Director until 2005. His activism led to Carter receiving a honorary Doctor of Laws degree from York University in October 2005. Carter died of cancer in 2014; John Artis cared for him during the final weeks of his life.