Source – nydailynews.com

 – The passing of prisoner-rights advocate Rubin “Hurricane” Carter should be a clarion call to champion prisoner’s rights.

“They can incarcerate my body but never my mind” —Rubin “Hurricane” Carter

For a man who spent nearly four decades of his seventy-six years under the restrictive eye of the US correctional system, few have ever touched as many lives as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. The world-class boxer turned wrongfully accused prisoner, turned advocate for the rights of the unjustly incarcerated, has succumbed to cancer, but his memory and work will endure as long as there are people outside and inside the prisons of the world fighting for justice.

It is difficult to think of more than a handful of prisoners in history who have had their story memorialized in popular culture quite like Rubin Carter. After his own infamous homicide conviction, Carter’s case inspired an international human rights movement. There were rallies, marches and all-star musical concerts in his name. He was even the subject of a Bob Dylan Top 40 hit, the frenzied fiddle anthem Hurricane. Carter also wrote, while behind bars, the bestselling book The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472. Finally after his release, he was the subject of the Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington film The Hurricane.

Yet despite the overturning of his murder conviction as well as a Hollywood canonization, Rubin Carter never rested. After decades behind bars, no one would have blinked if he had coasted on his celebrity for the remainder of his days. Instead, Mr. Carter started a nonprofit organization in his adopted home of Toronto in 2004 called Innocence International, aimed at shedding light on the cases of the wrongly convicted. Rubin Carter believed that the only thing exceptional about his conviction was the fact that people were aware and outraged that it had happened. In a country with the highest prison rate on the planet, where quality legal representation is more privilege than right, Rubin Carter knew that he had left an untold number of sisters and brothers behind. He had lived the racism of the criminal justice system and he had lived among the poor and mentally ill behind bars. Following his release, he was determined to be their advocate. Carter wrote in February, as he lay dying, that he “lived in hell for the first forty-nine years, and have been in heaven for the past twenty-eight years.” For him, heaven was doing this kind of work and struggle was the secret of joy.

I had many an interaction with Rubin Carter, never revolving around boxing or his near-miss in 1964 to win the middleweight championship. Our shared work existed in the context of campaigns for prisoners’ rights. Rubin Carter never refused any of my requests, no matter how obscure the case, to lend his name to a campaign. Like Denzel Washington said when he took Rubin Carter on stage with him when accepting the Golden Globe for best actor for The Hurricane, “He’s all love.”

Sure enough, during the last days of his life and in terrible pain, Rubin Carter was attempting to bring light to yet another prisoner he believed was being denied justice. On February 21, 2014, Carter published “Hurricane Carter’s Dying Wish,” in the New York Daily News. It detailed the case of David McCallum, who has been jailed for murder for almost thirty years, convicted at the age of 16. As Carter wrote, “McCallum was incarcerated two weeks after I was released, reborn into the miracle of this world. Now I’m looking death straight in the eye; he’s got me on the ropes, but I won’t back down…. My aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward, to give the help that I received as a wrongly convicted man to another who needs such help now.”

The best possible tribute to Rubin Carter would not be to listen to some Bob Dylan or read a few obits. It would be to contact new Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson—his “action line” phone number is 718-250-2340—and ask him to fulfill Hurricane’s request to reopen the case of David McCallum. After all, this was the dying wish of the Hurricane.

http://www.thenation.com/article/death-and-lifes-work-unconquerable-rubin-hurricane-carter/

Related…

Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom

“The alternative to being a victim is being free. That’s the alternative to being a victim. Freedom or victimhood. And freedom is far better than victimhood could ever be. That’s free from thought. Free from doubt. Free from all of these things that cause us so much problems. Free from being black. Free from being a man. You know, free from being a human being! I don’t want to be a human being. Human beings hate one another. They kill one another. I want to be a human becoming something other than a human being. I want to be an awakened, enlightened soul, where I can walk on this earth and see everybody on this earth as the beautiful flower that they really are.”

— Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, Retired prize-fighter, exonerated of a wrongful murder conviction, Author of “Eye of the Hurricane” (Photo Credit Sue Folinsbee)

Memorialized in a Bob Dylan song and an Academy Award-nominated portrayal by Denzel Washington, Rubin Carter was known as “The Hurricane” in his days as a middle-weight prize-fighter. But in 1966, he was accused of a triple homicide in his home town of Paterson, New Jersey. Carter, and a co-defendant, staunchly maintained their innocence, that they were not in the bar room where the shootings occurred. Both black, they were convicted by an all-white jury, despite dubious testimony by the only supposed witness.

After more than 19 years behind bars, Carter was exonerated when a federal judge declared the witness “unbelievable” and the trial racially charged. But beforehand, Carter had become deeply embittered. Eventually, as chronicled in his 2010 spiritual memoir, he came to realize that feeling victimized robbed him further of his freedom.

In this story, we hear how he transcended the “inner prison” of hatred, self-hatred and playing “the victim”. Recorded at age 74, Carter advocates on behalf of other prisoners who were wrongly convicted, an incarcerated population estimated to number in the tens of thousands in the United States. A remarkable and provocative story on many levels, including excerpts of Dylan’s famous song.

Related…

Hurricane Carter’s Dying Wish:

He asks Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson to free another man who was wrongly convicted

You may remember me from my other life as a middleweight boxer. But fate had other plans for me; I was wrongly convicted of a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey, and spent 19 years in prison trying, along with generous friends and good people from every walk of life, to right this wrong and gain my freedom.

I am now quite literally on my deathbed and am making my final wish to those with the legal authority to act.

My single regret in life is that David McCallum of Brooklyn — a man incarcerated in 1985, the same year I was released, and represented by Innocence International since 2004 — is still in prison. I request only that McCallum be granted a full hearing by the Brooklyn conviction integrity unit, now under the auspices of the new district attorney, Ken Thompson.

Knowing what I do, I am certain that when the facts are brought to light, Thompson will recommend his immediate release.

A man like McCallum, who has been wrongly convicted and has so far spent 28 years (beginning when he was just 16) behind bars, needs an unprejudiced higher authority, a person with nothing to lose or gain by righting an injustice, to examine the evidence that people have refused to act on all these years. Is it willful blindness or self-interest that was to blame?

Willie Stuckey, who was wrongly convicted along with McCallum, has already died in prison. Do we need David to die as well to avoid an inconvenient truth?

The details of this case would be the subject of the hearing, but I can say unequivocally that McCallum (who is being represented pro bono by attorneys Oscar Michelen and John O’Hara) and Stuckey are as innocent of the kidnapping and murder of 20-year-old Nathan Blenner in October of 1985 as anyone now reading this plea.

Not a single piece of evidence ever implicated them in this crime nor placed them anywhere near the scene. Their two confessions, gained by force and trickery, are not corroborated even by each other; they read as if two different crimes were committed.

The police, prosecutor, and judge jumped on those confessions like dogs on a bone, and the office of the previous Brooklyn DA, Charlie “Joe” Hynes, had been chewing on it ever since. New affidavits strongly indicate that potentially exculpatory police reports were lost, discarded or suppressed. DNA testing and fingerprint evidence all point in other directions.

The Brooklyn DA’s office has, as I said, a Conviction Integrity Unit and this conviction has no integrity.

I was freed from a living hell by the brave Judge H. Lee Sarokin, after I was given help from dedicated people who did so for no payment beyond the thanks I was able to give.

McCallum was incarcerated two weeks after I was released, reborn into the miracle of this world. Now I’m looking death straight in the eye; he’s got me on the ropes, but I won’t back down.

I ask Thompson to look straight in the eye of truth, a tougher customer than death, and not back down either.

Just as my own verdict “was predicated on racism rather than reason and on concealment rather than disclosure,” as Sarokin wrote, so too was McCallum’s. My aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward, to give the help that I received as a wrongly convicted man to another who needs such help now.

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.

Carter is an advocate for wrongly convicted prisoners

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/hurricane-carter-dying-article-1.1621747