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Hurricane
Carter says he was wrongfully convicted of a triple murder he
didn’t commit. Carter was guilty of nothing more than a DWB
-- Driving While Black
-- in the small hours on a hot New Jersey night when four people were gunned down
in the Lafayette Grill. He claims he was well-known for his
black militancy, tailed by the FBI
and hassled by police wherever he went. So, when Paterson, New
Jersey police needed a scapegoat for a brutal crime,
they framed the Hurricane. The conspiracy against him reached
right up to the governor’s office and down
to the lowest petty criminal. That’s his story, and Carter
is still sticking to it.
But
there are two serious problems with the conspiracy theory. One
is that Carter wasn’t an angry black activist. He was angry,
he was black, but he was not an activist.
In
Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter,
author James Hirsch weaves references to the Civil Rights movement
and the Black Power movement through Carter’s life, but an important
element is missing -- there is no proof that Carter ever participated
in civil rights activity and Hirsch admits as much: "Before
his own arrest (for the murders), Carter had never been political."
And although Hirsch asserts that Carter was "well known"
for his views on "self-defence," there's no evidence of this
-- no photos, no quotes, no dates. Hirsch has carefully combed
through Carter’s record in preparing the book, but there's no
indication that Carter knew Huey P. Newton from a Fig Newton.
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Carter
liked to drive a flashy Cadillac, dress sharp, cruise
the bars and get into fights. Yes, he highly resented being arrested
on these occasions, but this should not be confused with
civil rights work. “You have an exaggerated sense of your
own self-importance,” his wife tells him at one point,
and she ought to know.
Carter’s
lawyers conceded there was a “mountain of incriminating
evidence” that placed him in the Lafayette bar on the
night of the killings. But there's not even a molehill
of evidence to show he was an activist. Instead, adroitly
abetted by Hirsch, he draws
the mantle of noble martyrs around his shoulders.
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From
the Norman Jewison movie
The Hurricane: The
all white jury: part of a conspiracy?
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The other problem
with Carter’s story is that, although the police and prosecutors
made blunders in the case, there's no credible evidence of a conspiracy.
The judge at the first trial was
famous for his fearless, even ruthless, campaign against government
corruption. He didn’t think Carter was credible. The prosecutor
at the second trial was
a civil rights activist and member of the NAACP. He, too was not
impressed by Carter’s accusations. Two juries found him guilty
as charged.
Carter’s
conspiracy would have involved dozens of witnesses, scores of
policemen, prosecutors, jurors, politicians and judges -- enough
people to have their own “I Framed The Hurricane” t-shirts and
signet rings. There’s enough people to hold annual conspiracy
reunions at the Paterson Ramada. But Carter’s fans, who take
his assertions at face value, do not extend the presumption
of innocence to the New Jersey authorities.
Two
trials, scores of witnesses, a dozen appeals later, the “conspiracy”
fails and Carter goes free. But no heads roll. No prosecutors
are indicted for intimidating witnesses or stacking juries.
No policemen with tortured consciences admit to planting evidence
or falsifying lie detector tests. If such a gross miscarriage
of justice actually occurred, it should still matter to someone,
somewhere -- maybe even Carter-- that the guilty are apprehended
and punished.
The
case for a conspiracy remains unproven, in Hirsch’s book or
elsewhere. Although Hirsch reports Carter’s accusations and
suspicions, there is little serious journalistic effort on his
part to evaluate their credibility. But by the penultimate appeal,
when the prosecutor pleads that a man with Rubin Carter’s appalling record of violence
should not be let out of jail, Hirsch acknowledges that New
Jersey authorities really saw him as a truly dangerous man.
Prosecutors
withheld significant information about a key witness, and a
Federal judge ruled that this was one of two grounds on which
to overturn the second trial conviction.
In
addition, the judge decided the alleged
motive for the crime -- revenge for the shooting of a black
man -- was racist. Just because a black man was shot in Paterson
that night, and just because other blacks were heard to express
anger over the killing, and just because Carter was there, there
is no reason to assume that Carter felt anger or acted on his
anger, Judge Sarokin said. But by the same token, just because
blacks courageously put their lives on the line in the Sixties
for the civil rights movement, there is no reason to assume
that Carter felt or acted as they did. If it is racist to assume
that Carter was a savage, it is likewise racist to assume that
he's noble.
It's
ironic that Carter ultimately won his freedom this way, when
Hirsch's entire book is about explaining the actions of Carter's
tormentors based on their race. The judges are white. The police
are white. The prosecutors are white. The eye witnesses are
white. The jurors are white. So naturally they’d want
to conspire together to put the Hurricane away. Instead of the
“racial revenge” theory, which Sarokin indignantly condemned,
we have the “white people want to frame the Hurricane” theory.
Promoting this theory doesn’t make you a racist. It does sell
books, though.
Lona
Manning, October, 2000
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