Ruby Carter

Ruby Carter
Rubin Carter 2011
Data
Birth Name	Ruby Carter
Fight name	Hurricane
Weight class	medium weight
nationality	US-american
birthday	May 6, 1937
place of birth	Clifton, New Jersey
Date of death	April 20, 2014
Place of death	Toronto
style	Left delivery
Combat Statistics
Struggles	40
Victories	27
Knockout victories	19th
Defeats	12
draw	1

Rubin Carter, 1961

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (born May 6, 1937 in Clifton , New Jersey , † April 20, 2014 in Toronto , Ontario , Canada ) was an American middleweight boxer who was active between 1961 and 1966. He was imprisoned for murder from 1966 and was not acquitted by a federal court until 1985 when the case was retried.

Life

Childhood and youth

Carter was born on May 6, 1937, the fourth of 7 brothers in Clifton, New Jersey. His father was considered humorless and very strict, who also beat his children more often with the belt. Furthermore, the young Rubin was known for his outbursts of anger and violence, and he came into conflict with the law several times. At the age of 12 he ended up in the boys' education institution in Jamesburg. At the age of 17 Rubin fled the reformatory and joined the army. After completing his basic training, he was posted to West Germany, where he climbed into the boxing ring for the US Army and won two light welterweight championships.

Because of his constant disobedience, he stood before the court martial four times and was discharged from the US Army in May 1956 as "unfit for military service".

Carter returned to Paterson, New Jersey, where he initially spent 10 months in juvenile detention because of his escape from the correctional facility. He then committed several crimes and a. Robberies. He was sentenced to four years in prison for this. While in detention, Carter decided to get a grip on his life. He trained his boxing skills and after his release he entered the ring as a professional middleweight boxer.

Boxing career

Carter had - especially with the left hook - a great punch and good taker skills, but he lacked boxing class, so that he often lost on points. However, he was able in 1962 to Cuban Florentino Fernandez in round one and in 1963 the only Emile Griffith early ko beat. An unusual point win he succeeded in 1964 against Jimmy Ellis . These successes earned him a title fight against Joey Giardello , which he lost unanimously just on points. After further defeats, including against Dick Tiger and Luis Rodríguez , he fell back in the rankings.

His match record: 40 fights, 27 wins (19 by knockout), 12 defeats and 1 draw. Carter was a so-called "puncher" - extremely powerful and quick.

Because of his fast, hard hands and his aggressive boxing style, he received the battle name "Hurricane".

The bloody deed: Paterson / New Jersey June 17, 1966

Witnesses report that two black people armed with a pistol and a rifle entered the Lafayette bar, which was only allowed to go to whites. They shot three people and fled in a white dodge . The victims were bartender James Oliver and guests Fred Nauyoks and Hazel Tanis. Another guest, Willie Marins, was hit so badly in the head that he went blind in one eye. Just a few minutes after the massacre, Rubin Carter, who was driving his white Dodge near the crime scene with his buddy John Artis, was stopped by the police. Ammunition was found in the vehicle that matched the murder weapons - a pistol and a rifle. The authenticity of this evidence was questioned by the defense during the trial, as it was not officially registered until five days after the crime. The police also failed to take fingerprints at the crime scene and to examine the suspects' hands for traces of smoke. Carter and Artis vehemently protested their innocence and also passed their polygraph tests . In addition, neither Tanis, who initially survived the attack and only later died in the hospital, nor Marins could identify the two as the perpetrators. So she was released again.

Four months later, Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley, two well-known white criminals, said they had seen Carter and Artis leave the Lafayette bar with a pistol and rifle and flee in a white Dodge.

On the basis of these very dubious testimonies and a completely inadequate evidence, Carter and Artis were arrested.

Murder trial

His boxing career ended in 1966 when he and his friend John Artis were found guilty of the murder of three whites in New Jersey and sentenced to "three life imprisonment". In the jury was not colored, and the jury delivered their verdict based on questionable testimony of two (white) criminal. After numerous legal proceedings and a new conviction in a second trial in 1976, the acquittal followed in 1985 after the federal court ruled that there had been "gross procedural violations" and the prosecution dropped the charges (John Artis was released on parole several years earlier) . The case went down in US legal history as a legal scandal . Previously, celebrities such as Bob Dylan , who wrote the song Hurricane for him in 1975 , or Muhammad Ali for Rubin Carter had campaigned. The song Hurricane first appeared on Dylan's album Desire and opens the album.

Rubin Carter last lived in Toronto, where he headed the Association in Defense of the Wrongfully Convicted for many years , which campaigns for those wrongly convicted. In 1993 he was the first boxer outside the ring to be awarded the World Championship Belt by the World Boxing Council . In 2005 he received two honorary doctorates in law for his commitment to civil rights.

The time in prison

In the prison, "Hurricane" worked diligently to get the trial retried. He wrote his biography "The Sixteenth Round" which was published in 1974. He sent a copy to Bob Dylan, who then visited him in 1975 in Trenton State Prison and wrote the world hit "Hurricane". However, the text does not correspond to reality on some points. The case caused a sensation in the United States, and other celebrities also stood up for Carter. Muhammad Ali dedicated a title fight to him and organized a concert with Dylan in December 1975 in New York's Madison Square Garden under the title "Night of the Hurricane". Another concert under the name "Night of the Hurricane II" followed in 1976 in Houston / Texas.

When Bello and Bradley revoked their testimony after seven years and claimed to have lied, Carter and Artis were initially released on bail. But the revision process failed, u. a. because Bello and Bradley withdrew their withdrawal. The jury confirmed the verdict of three times for life.

Carter then resignedly gave up his fight for release from prison and cut himself off from everyone and everything. But a Canadian group of civil rights activists and Carter's attorney Myron Beldock continued to fight for him, collecting more evidence and pointing out inconsistencies and contradictions. These inconsistencies, but also the contradicting behavior of Bob Dylan and other prominent supporters of Carter, were the subject of the American author Nelson Algren in the 1981 novel "The Devil's Stocking" ("Calhoun - novel of a crime"). Algren retraces the events of June 17, 1966 with great journalistic care and also tells the story of the two dubious witnesses to the bloody act and the highly dubious role of the police and public prosecutor. There was another retrial in 1985. On December 7, 1985, the federal court, presided over by Judge Sarokin, passed judgment that Carter had been the victim of an unfair trial based on racial prejudice and that human decency required his immediate release. After 19 years, Carter was a free man again; no detention compensation was ever paid.

After release from prison

Carter moved his residence to Toronto / Canada, from where he stood up for those wrongly convicted. He married for the second time, but his marriage to Lisa Peters did not last long.

In 1993 he was awarded an honorary championship belt by the WBC at the Sahara Hotel / Las Vegas as the first boxer outside the ring. A short time later he was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

In 1996, Carter met Bob Dylan again when he was giving a concert in Toronto. When asked about the Carter case, Dylan mysteriously replied that he had heard many stories about what really happened back then - they were good and bad. The case is over for him.

Until 2005 "Hurricane" worked as a managing director at the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted. Then he left the association and founded his own group "Innocence International". In 2005, he was awarded honorary doctorates by York University in Toronto and Griffith University in Brisbane for his tireless commitment.

In 2011 he published another biography "Eye of the Hurricane", in which Nelson Mandela wrote the foreword. In the same year he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Despite his illness, Carter continued to work tirelessly for victims of justice. Until his death he fought vehemently for the release of David McCallum, who had been incarcerated for murder since 1985 and whom he believed to be innocent.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter passed away on April 20, 2014; McCallum was found innocent and released on October 15, 2014 after 29 years.

To this day, opinions differ on whether or not Carter and Artis committed the bloodbath. The fact is, however, that both of them should not have been convicted of gross procedural violations and were therefore wrongly incarcerated.

filming

Great attention was also turned 1999 film version of the story Carter ( Hurricane ) with Denzel Washington in the title role , which for his portrayal of the Golden Globe and the Silver Bear at the International Film Festival in Berlin was awarded. With some critics, however, the truthfulness of the film is controversial. In particular, the family of the investigating police officer attaches great importance to the finding that this in no way corresponded to the film policeman. The boxer Joey Giardello successfully sued the film company for damages because the victory in a fight shown in the film went to him due to a racist jury, but he had actually won regularly.

literature

• Ulf Harms: The splendor and misery of the boxer Rubin Carter . Facts, Volume 317. Military Publishing House of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1988. ISBN 3-327-00616-4
• Rubin "Hurricane" Carter: The 16th Round (autobiography); New York: Viking Press, 1974; ISBN 0-670-64750-0 . New edition: Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill, 2011. ISBN 978-1-569-76567-8 .
• Nelson Algren "The Devil's Stocking (" Calhoun - Roman of a Crime ")", Frankfurt, Two Thousand One, 1981, edited and translated by Carl Weissner
• Sam Chaiton & Terry Swinton: Hurricane. The true story of the ruby ​​"Hurricane" Carter Goldmann Taschenbuch, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-44715-1

Web links

Commons : Rubin Carter  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Rubin Carter in the BoxRec database
• Literature by and about Rubin Carter in the catalog of the German National Library
• Rubin Carter in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Boxer and civil rights activist: Rubin "Hurricane" Carter is dead ; Spiegel Online , April 20, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ^ Columns 1 to 3, below: "" Hurricane "Carter free after 19 years" . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna November 9, 1985, p. 24 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).