Rubin "Hurricane" Carter Trials: 1967, 1988 - Second Conviction Overturned On Appeal

But Carter was not your typical prisoner—he was even given a $10,000 advance from a publisher for an autobiography he soon published under the title The Sixteenth Round. His case had attracted the attention of numerous prominent individuals, including a reporter for the New York Times who located the two petty crooks, Bello and Bradley, who had claimed to have seen Carter and Artis running from the bar. They now recanted their testimony, admitting that they had lied to gain favorable treatment from the police. By 1975 the Hurricane Trust Fund had been started and a host of celebrities were lending their names to his cause—everyone from Burt Reynolds and Stevie Wonder to Muhammad Ali and Coretta Scott King. Perhaps the biggest boost to the campaign to get a new trial for Carter came when Bob Dylan wrote a song, "Hurricane," and proceeded to sing it across the country.

Then in March 1976, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Carter and Artis on the grounds that the prosecution had withheld a tape recording of an interview with Bello that revealed the state had promised Bello favorable treatment in return for his testimony. The two men were freed on bail (most of it posted by Muhammad Ali) but the New Jersey prosecutor soon re-indicted them. By the time the second trial began in November 1976, Bello had once again changed his story and he became the prosecution's chief witness. This time he took the stand and insisted that not only had he seen Carter and Artis running from the bar, he had told the police so that night. Equally damaging to the defense, the judge allowed the prosecution to introduce testimony about the angry blacks that had gathered outside the bar that evening, the bar where a white man had shot the black bartender. This fortified the state's claim that Carter and Artis had shot the four in retaliation.

The second jury convicted Carter and Artis on the same three counts of first degree murder. The two went back to prison, and it took another nine years and a frustrating series of appeals before a federal judge in New Jersey, H. Lee Sarokin, set aside the convictions, on the grounds that the state had violated the constitutional rights of Carter and Artis by failing to disclose the results of a lie detector test given to Bello and by introducing the claim that the killings were motivated by racial revenge. On August 21, 1987, the Federal Third Circuit Court upheld Judge Sarokin, and on February 27, 1988, the state of New Jersey formally announced it would not seek to re-indict Carter. The long trial of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter had finally ended.