Rubin "Hurricane" Carter Trials: 1967, 1988

The trial took place in the Passaic County Court in Paterson, New Jersey, and it came at a time when there was great unrest in the African-American communities across the United States. Just finding a jury willing to deal with the controversial Carter took three weeks. In the end, the 14 jurors (this included two substitutes) included only one person of color—a West Indian. In his opening statement, the prosecutor claimed that the police had found an unspent shotgun shell and .32 caliber bullet in the car Carter was riding in that evening—yet this evidence had never been cited during the four months between the police's search of his car and his arrest. Carter's lawyer announced that this would be challenged, and it later turned out that neither the shell nor the bullet was of the same kind found at the crime scene.

Long before this, Carter's lawyer lit into the first witness called by the prosecution—the one surviving bar patron, William Marins. He was the man who on the night of the murders had told the police that Carter and Artis were not the men who had shot him and the others. Before he was through, the lawyer established that Marins had on more than one occasion testified that the two gunmen were tall and light-colored men, and that one had a moustache. Neither Carter nor Artis fit that description; Carter in particular was short, very dark, wore a beard—and above all, had his unmistakable trademark, his polished bald head.

The rest of the state's evidence was equally weak. The murder weapons had never been found; there were no bloodstains on Carter's or Artis's belongings; the police had not taken any fingerprints nor conducted paraffin tests of the defendants' hands (for traces of gunpowder). One of the witnesses, a woman who lived above the bar and claimed she had a good view of the get-away car's taillights, described lights different from those on Carter's car that night.

There had been talk of the state's producing "mystery witnesses," and this they did. They were two small-time crooks, Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley, who freely admitted that on the night of the murders they were engaged in trying to rob a nearby business. Bradley simply testified that he had seen Carter running down the street after the shooting, but Bello produced an elaborate story. He had seen three black men cruising in a white car before he decided to go into the bar to buy a pack of cigarettes. As he approached the tavern, he heard shots and saw two black men emerge with a shotgun and pistol; he got a clear look at them and fled as the two got into the white car and drove away. Bello then went into the bar and saw all the bodies, but he simply stole $62 from the cash register. Confronted with the fact that on the night of the murders, he had not identified Carter or Artis when they were brought to the bar or the police station, Bello claimed he had been afraid that his life would be in danger.

When it came to the defense case, all Carter and Artis could do was to provide accounts of their activities that night and witnesses to support their versions of events. Typical of Carter, though, he took the stand in the same cream-colored sport coat he was wearing the night of the murders. This was to highlight the fact that the same woman who said she had a good view of the getaway car's headlights had also described the two fleeing black men as wearing dark clothes.

In the end, though, the jury was not influenced by any of the evidence that might clear Carter and Artis. They apparently accepted the prosecution's claim that Carter and Artis had committed these slayings to revenge the murder of a black barkeeper by a white man earlier that evening—only a few blocks from the Lafayette Grill. After only two hours of deliberation, the jury returned with a unanimous verdict: guilty of all three counts. The jury's only act of moderation was to recommend life imprisonment instead of execution. And although Artis got the same judgment as Carter, it was quite clear to all involved that the prosecution was most pleased that it had finally put Carter away for life.