Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was a professional boxer who had been a #1 contender for the middleweight boxing crown. In 1966, he and his friend John Artis were wrongfully arrested for a triple murder which took place in a bar in New Jersey.  While some still maintain that it is not entirely clear who committed the crime, it is very clear that Carter and Artis did not receive a fair trial. To Read more about the story follow the links

The Hurricane Story

The Rubin Carter Case

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06/17/66
Two men and a woman are fatally shot at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, NJ.  Following the shooting, police arrest Rubin Carter and John Artis and take them to the hospital room where the surviving victim of the shooting, William Marins, is recovering from his gunshot wound.  Marins was unable to identify Carter and Artis as the trigger men.  Police declare that Carter and Artis "were never suspects."

06/29/66
Carter and Artis testify voluntarily before a Passaic County grand jury and are exonerated.  They are not indicted by grand juries in August, September, or October.

10/14/66
Key prosecution witness Alfred P. Bello, who was a known felon at the time, gives the police a signed statement claiming he saw Carter and Artis at the murder scene. Carter and Artis are arrested and later indicted for the triple murders.  Apparently, lawyers for the prosecution were in possession of a tape recording in which Bello indicates that he is uncertain as to whether or not Carter and Artis were present at the bar.  However, these tapes were withheld from the defense (more on this later).

05/27/67
An all white jury convicts Carter and Artis. The prosecutor seeks death penalty, but the jury recommends mercy. Carter and Artis are sentenced to three life terms.

04/30/74
Carter is illegally transferred from Rahway State Prison to the Vroom Readjustment Unit at the Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital.

07/74
Carter files a federal suit against the state for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment. After a hearing, Federal District Judge Clarkson S. Fisher orders Carter's immediate release from illegal detention in the Readjustment Unit.

09/74
Carter's book, The Sixteenth Round, is published by Viking Press.  Bello and Arthur D. Bradley, the only witnesses to claim Carter and Artis were at the scene, separately recant and state they were pressured by Paterson detectives to give false testimony; they were offered $10,000 in reward money and promises of lenient treatment in criminal charges pending against them.

05/75
Carter sends a copy of his book to Dylan "because of his prior commitment to the civil rights struggle".

06/75
Dylan visits Carter in prison. "The first time I saw him, I left knowing one thing ... I realized that the man's philosophy and my philosophy were running down the same road, and you don't meet too many people like that".

07/75
Dylan and Jacques Levy write the song Hurricane.  The original recording is never released.

10/24/75
Hurricane is re-recorded with slightly different lyrics.  CBS lawyers feel that the lines about Bradley and Bello "robbing the bodies" could lead to litigation. (Later they are sued by Patty Valentine, who lost the suit in 1979)

03/17/76
The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously overturns the convictions, ruling that the prosecution withheld evidence favorable to the defense, and orders a new trial. Carter and Artis are released on bail.

12/22/76
After a second trial in which the prosecution was allowed to argue for the first time that the murders were motivated by racial revenge, Carter and Artis are reconvicted; the same life sentences are imposed, and they are forced to return to prison.

12/22/81
Artis is released on parole, after serving 15 years.

08/17/82
The New Jersey Supreme Court, in a 4-to-3 decision, rejects an appeal for a new trial.

11/07/85
Judge H. Lee Sarokin of Federal District Court in Newark, NJ overturns the second trial convictions after finding that the prosecution committed "grave constitutional violations."   In his decision to grant Carter a writ of habeas corpus, Sarokin wrote:

"The extensive record clearly demonstrates that the petitioners' convictions were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than  disclosure .  .  .  .  To permit convictions to stand which have as their foundation appeals to racial prejudice and the withholding of evidence critical to the defense is to commit a violation of the Constitution as heinous as the crimes for which these petitioners were tried and convicted."

11/08/85
The prosecutors argue that Carter is dangerous and should remain in prison pending the state's appeal. Finding no evidence of dangerousness, Judge Sarokin orders Carter free without bail: "human decency mandates his immediate release". Carter has served 19 years in prison.

12/19/85
The prosecutors assert to the United States Third Circuit Court of Appeals that Carter is a danger to the community and should be reincarcerated pending appeal.

01/17/86
The court rejects the state's arguments, and Carter remains free.

08/21/87
The US Court of Appeals upholds Judge Sarokin's decision throwing out the convictions.

01/11/88
The US Supreme Court denies the state's appeal, thus affirming Judge Sarokin's rulings.

02/19/88
The Passaic County Prosecutor's Office announces that they will not seek a third trial, and they file a motion to dismiss the 1966 indictments against Carter and Artis.

02/26/88
A Passaic County judge signs the order dismissing the indictments.

04/11/96
Carter is arrested and taken into custody by Toronto narcotics officers who were searching for a cocaine dealer who had sold to an undercover cop.  The police called it a "case of mistaken identity," and said they would pay for the damage his car sustained during the search.  Carter, who spent 19 years in jail last time he was wrongfully arrested, was extremely angry.  "I am so furious that what happened happened simply because I was wearing a jacket and I am black," he said after his release.
 

Sources: Various biographies, "Outside The Law," Look Back 1988, Sports Illustrated, the Toronto Star and various web sites.

The Rubin Carter Case

On June 17, 1966, around 2:30 a.m., James Oliver, 51, stood behind the bar of the Lafayette Bar and Grill, in Paterson, N.J., counting the day's receipts. Two regulars, William Marins, 43, and Fred Nauyaks, 61, had been shooting pool for beers, and now sat two stools apart at the bar. At the shorter limb of the L-shaped bar, a country-club waitress named Hazel Tanis, 51, lingered over a VO and soda.

Then two gunmen -- one with a shotgun, the other a handgun -- entered the bar and started shooting. James Oliver threw a bottle and tried to run, but took a shotgun blast to the spine and died instead. The intruder with the handgun dispatched Fred Nauyaks with a bullet to the brain stem: He was found crumpled over the bar, where he'd left a full drink, enough money to pay for another and a puddle of his internal fluids. His companion, William Marins, was also hit in the head; the bullet punctured his temple and blew out over his eye, taking the optic nerve with it. (Amazingly, when the paramedics arrived, they found Marins still walking around and speaking coherently; he survived the shooting but died from unrelated causes a year later.)

Then they spotted Hazel Tanis. She screamed as the man with the handgun moved to within one foot of her and fired, once, twice, four times altogether. The man with the shotgun also fired at close range. She was hit in the right breast, stomach, lower abdomen and genital region, yet survived for a month after the shooting.

Soon after, Patricia Valentine, who lived above the tavern, told police she saw two black men flee in a white car. Within half an hour, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, 29, a famous boxer, and John Artis, 19, an unemployed youth, had been stopped and brought to the scene of the crime. After that, agreement on what happened begins to break down. But no one disputes that the convictions of these two men became the occasion of the lengthiest and bitterest legal dispute in New Jersey history.

At their first trial, in 1967, they were both found guilty of murder on all three counts. Mr. Carter received two consecutive and one concurrent life terms, Mr. Artis three concurrent. They steadfastly maintained they were innocent, and in the early 1970s became the focus for a massive campaign that attracted such celebrity supporters as Mohammad Ali and Bob Dylan, who wrote a song, Hurricane, about their case. In 1976 their convictions were overturned after two witnesses recanted. But at a retrial the same year, the convictions were reinstated. Nine years later, their second conviction was also overturned, this time by a federal judge. All told, Mr. Carter served 19 years in prison, Mr. Artis 15. The prosecution could have sought a new trial to argue Mr. Carter's guilt, but did not, because more than 20 years had passed and a number of the witnesses were dead. There was no commission of inquiry or suit for damages.

Hurricane Carter's unflinching declaration of innocence is just one reason his story continues, even today, to fascinate. The fact is, he was a colourful personality. The No. 1 contender for the middleweight title at the time of his arrest, Mr. Carter was a flamboyant celebrity who wore sharkskin suits and drove a car with his name stencilled in silver on the side. An uncompromising voice for civil rights, he was also, by his own account, an arrogant and angry man. His rage sustained him during his years in prison, where he refused to wear the prison's uniform or eat its food. (He was received supplies delivered from outside.)

The forthcoming Norman Jewison film, The Hurricane, which opens at the end of December, uses considerable dramatic licence in recounting Mr. Carter's story. But one part of that story it does not address is what happened in court. The trials that convicted Mr. Carter, the evidence the lawyers used to argue his innocence and guilt, the arguments -- almost none of these events are shown.

What happened in the courtroom may not be the most inspiring part of Mr. Carter's saga, but it is the most important. It raises the most public and pressing question, which is the question of justice, and which it is necessary to piece together from the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about the case, in books, briefs, transcripts, decisions and articles.

This is not easily done. H. Lee Sarokin, a federal judge who heard Mr. Carter's case after it had worked its way through the entire New Jersey legal system, has written that "from the thousands of pages of testimony spanning two trials and numerous hearings, the parties have reconstructed two drastically different versions of the events that tragic night."

The National Post undertook to revisit the case for two reasons.

One, it is more dramatic than any film.

Second, there may indeed be two versions of what happened in New Jersey 30 years ago.

But only one is true.

Down in New Jersey, you hear a lot about Rubin Carter's guilt.

Bruno Leopizzi, the now-retired judge at Mr. Carter's second trial, offers this view of the soon-to-be-released film: "If they're portraying him as an innocent defendant who was wrongly convicted, that's totally wrong, absolutely wrong. If they showed the trial and gave it an honest look, they couldn't say he's innocent."

"I read the transcripts," concurs Patrick J. Caserra, an officer with the Bar Association in Passaic County, where Mr. Carter was tried. "It was a solid case for the state."

Likewise, Ray Abt, the court reporter for the first trial, recalls a strong prosecution. "It was what I would call -- as a reporter, and I've taken a lot of trials over the years -- what we call a clean trial."

A conservative magazine, The American Spectator, once voiced the view that Mr. Carter is guilty. But it is probably most exhaustively expressed in a 500-page manuscript that has long circulated in anti-Carter legal circles in New Jersey. Written by a local attorney (uninvolved with the case), it condemns the celebrities, advocates and journalists who championed Mr. Carter's cause as "a gang of marauders out to sabotage the American jury system."

Those who say Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis are guilty often make the point that the second conviction was overturned by a single judge -- but 24 jurors found him guilty.

And then they point to the evidence.

- THE WITNESSES: Patricia Valentine, who lived above the Lafayette Bar, testified in 1976 that she was awoken around 2:30 a.m. by shots from the tavern. She says she saw two black men run out of the bar to a white car. She noted out-of-state licence plates, which were dark blue with yellow or gold letters. The tail lights of the car had a distinctive butterfly shape.

Mr. Carter was driving a white rental car with New York plates -- yellow on blue -- when stopped by the police shortly after the murder. The tail lights were wider at the outside and tapered toward the centre.

Alfred Bello, a career criminal, was robbing a factory near the Lafayette that night. He testified he saw Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis walking out just after the shots were fired. "One was swinging a shotgun. The shorter one was closer to the building, and the one out towards the car had a pistol. They were laughing and talking loud."

- THE MOTIVE: The name Leroy Holloway is not mentioned in The Hurricane, but it was heard often at both trials. Holloway, who was black, owned the Waltz Inn in Paterson. About eight hours before the Lafayette Bar murders, a white man, who had sold the Waltz to Holloway, came into the bar and blew Holloway's head off with a shotgun. Holloway was behind in his payments.

The prosecution argued that Holloway's murder had a number of points of intersection with the murders that Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were accused of. "Two bartenders were murdered. Each man was killed by a blast from a shotgun fired at close range," the prosecutors have written, and "neither murder involved a robbery."

The prosecution's theory was that the Lafayette Bar murders were revenge for the killing of Leroy Holloway at the Waltz Inn. New Jersey, like many U.S. states, had had its share of race riots, and black-white violence was not unheard-of. The prosecution also noted that the Lafayette was on the border between the black and white parts of town. A police officer also testified he had answered calls following the white bartender's refusals to serve blacks -- hence the attractiveness of James Oliver to the avengers of a black bartender.

The prosecution introduced a web of evidence connecting the two killings, which occurred mere blocks apart. One strand was provided by Mr. Carter himself: Word of Holloway's murder spread quickly through the black community, and Mr. Carter told a grand jury that convened shortly after the murders, "It was all around that there was going to be some shaking [retaliation] going on."

Holloway's stepson, Eddie Rawls, isn't mentioned in The Hurricane either, but the night his stepfather was killed he went to the police station and, in some distress, according to the detectives, said he expected action in bringing the killer to justice. "You better well do it, or we will do something about it," he said angrily.

Mr. Rawls was a bartender at the Nite Spot, which Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis visited that evening, shortly after the murders. There, Mr. Rawls and Mr. Carter discussed Holloway's murder at the Waltz Inn, which had taken place several hours before.

- THE WEAPONS: "The first thing Rubin Carter did after talking to Eddie Rawls about his father's death was to try to find his guns," which had gone missing a year before, says a prosecution brief. The brief stresses that Mr. Carter initiated his search for them, despite their long absence, only after he had heard of Mr. Holloway's death and before the Lafayette murders. One of the missing guns was a shotgun.

A detective testified he found a bullet beneath the passenger seat in Mr. Carter's car. Unlike the bullets used in the murders, which were copper-coated, it had a lead casing. But it was a .32-calibre Smith & Wesson long bullet, the kind the handgun shooter used. The detective also said he found a shotgun shell in Carter's trunk. It too was slightly different from the shells used in the murders, but could have been fired from the same shotgun. Paul Alberta, a local reporter, testified he was in the police garage and witnessed the recovery of the bullets.

- THE ALIBI: At the 1967 trial, Welton Deary, a former sparring partner of Mr. Carter's, provided an alibi. At the 1976 trial, however, he testified that he'd lied at Mr. Carter's request. Similarly, Catherine McGuire, an acquaintance of Mr. Carter's, and her mother, Anna Brown, had also offered alibis in 1967, saying Mr. Carter drove them home on the night of the murders. In 1976, they testified that it had been on a different night that he'd given them a lift. Judge Leopizzi has said that hearing these witnesses, all black, recant their original testimony made the most powerful moments of the entire trial.

For his part, Mr. Carter declined to testify in his own defence.

The preceding version of events is taken largely from a legal brief written by John Goceljak and Ronald Marmo, who then worked for the Passaic County prosecutors' office. They prepared it for an unsuccessful 1987 federal appeal of the case.

Today, when a reporter asks the office for the transcripts of the 1976 conviction, the prosecutors' office sends out this brief instead. It contains even more damaging material than listed above. Mr. Goceljak is now dead; Mr. Marmo, now a judge, declined to speak on the record.

According to Lewis M. Steel, attorney for John Artis, in many instances the prosecution version was based on "taking a tiny tidbit and blowing it into something that has no relationship to reality."

- THE MOTIVE: Start with Eddie Rawls. He is the link between his stepfather, Holloway, and his stepfather's supposed avengers, Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis. And remember the prosecution's contention that Mr. Rawls was overwrought at the police station?

A defence witness, William Johnson, who was with Mr. Rawls at the police station, disputed this. He testified that Mr. Rawls "was not angry, nor making a disturbance, but simply an inquiry," as the defence noted in a 1985 brief.

There was no supporting evidence -- no written reports or previous testimony -- for the police version of Mr. Rawls' visit to the police station. Mr. Rawls' boss at the Nite Spot also testified he was not upset: "He might have been saddened inside, but from the outside he wasn't showing it." Certainly, no one ever testified that they heard Mr. Rawls say he had plans involving "killing white people" or "getting even." He was never a suspect.

According to the trial transcripts, Mr. Carter's "discussion" with Mr. Rawls about his stepfather's murder consisted merely of Mr. Carter expressing his condolences.

Nor was Holloway's murder the identical twin the prosecution made it out to be: He was the owner of a bar, not a bartender; was shot twice, not once; and was killed because of a business dispute, not a racial issue.

And contrary to reports that James Oliver, the dead Lafayette bartender, refused to serve blacks, three witness, including the police officer who claimed Oliver was racist, testified they often saw blacks served in the Lafayette.

- THE WEAPONS: The defence never disputed that some of Mr. Carter's guns had gone missing from his training camp a year earlier. But what the prosecution called a "search" on the night of the murders was something else entirely.

According to the defence, Mr. Carter happened to run into his sparring partner, Neil Morrison, at the Nite Spot. Mr. Carter said that a friend of his, Annabelle Chandler, had told him that Mr. Morrison had taken the guns and sold them. Mr. Morrison denied the theft. To resolve the matter, the two boxers went to the home of Ms. Chandler, who was dying of cancer. When they saw how ill she was, they soon dropped the matter and returned to the Nite Spot. There's no suggestion that Mr. Carter found his guns. His "search" consisted entirely of asking Ms. Chandler to confirm her earlier statement that Mr. Morrison had taken his guns.

A defence brief also notes that "the decision to go to Mrs. Chandler's apartment was made before anyone had heard about the [Holloway] shooting."

As defence lawyer Steel points out, the idea that Mr. Carter would bring his sparring partner to observe him recovering guns from Ms. Chandler before committing a triple homicide would be short-sighted in the extreme. "Carter's a very intelligent man: The thought that he would go and leave that kind of trail is bizarre."

And the bullets in the car? As a front-page article in The New York Times noted in 1974, there were irregularities in how the bullets were recorded at the police station. The police said they found them the night of the murders, yet they were not logged with the property clerk until five days later.

As for Paul Alberta, the reporter who said in 1976 he witnessed the recovery of the bullets, he never wrote about this event in any of the stories he wrote about the Carter case over the years -- even though the bullets were the subject of great journalistic interest. Such a story would have made Mr. Alberta's career. The nature of his relationship with the local police force, the defence also noted, is suggested in the fact that he fetched coffees for the officers at the station, and was particularly close to the officer who said he found the bullets.

- THE WITNESSES: All witnesses who spoke to the police the night of the murder said the killers were tall, light-skinned blacks without beards. However, Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis resembled Mutt and Jeff -- Mr. Carter was shorter and darker, with a shaved head and thick goatee. Even the lead detective at the 1967 trial noted "the description of the assailants is not even close."

Moreover, right after the murders, Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were taken by police to the hospital room of William Marins, the surviving shooting victim. He said they were not the killers.

Weldon Deary and Catherine McGuire, the witnesses from the first trial who recanted in the second were vulnerable to police pressure. Mr. Deary had a housing-authority police job in Paterson; Catherine McGuire, the woman who said Mr. Carter drove her and her mother home and then said he didn't, was engaged to a Paterson police officer.

But it was the testimony of the eyewitness, Alfred Bello, that really made -- and ultimately ruined -- the prosecution's case.

One prosecutor noted that bank presidents aren't always available at the scene of a murder. When it comes to credible observers, in other words, the investigators often have to take what they can get.

In 1967, Mr. Bello testified he saw Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis leave the Lafayette that night on his way in to buy cigarettes. This was supported by Arthur Bradley, his robbery partner. Mr. Bello said that inside the bar, confronted by the dead and wounded, his first move was to approach the cash register and help himself to some bills.

Four months later, when they were brought in for questioning about the shootings, the two crooks identified Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis as the shooters that night. They were never arrested for the Lafayette burglary, and on a tape recording a Paterson detective promises to "go to the top people in the state of New Jersey" to ensure lenient punishment for Mr. Bello if he will co-operate.

Not telling the defence about this promise of lenient treatment led to the overturning of Mr. Carter's first conviction.

In 1974, Mr. Bello and Mr. Bradley both recanted. "There's no doubt Carter was framed . . . . I lied to save myself," Mr. Bello told The New York Times. "The cops told me I'd be doing justice for the families of the white victims -- It would be an eye for an eye.... They told me to help your own people, and I went for it."

In 1975 Mr. Bello again changed his story (though Mr. Bradley didn't). His most frequent new version was that he had been inside the bar at the time of the shootings -- yet had been unable to identify the gunmen. After being approached by people who might help him get money for his story, he added the incredible detail that he had used Hazel Tanis as a shield to avoid being shot himself. But at the 1976 retrial, he reverted to his original 1967 outside-the-bar story.

Mr. Bello's testimony about that night was central to Mr. Carter's going to jail in 1967.

Just as it was central to getting him released 19 years later.

Bello submitted to a polygraph test before the 1976 retrial to find out which, if any, of his stories was true. The polygrapher twice told the police that he believed Mr. Bello was telling the truth when he said he was in the bar. The prosecution did not introduce this oral report in court because, the defence lawyers maintain, they feared it would suggest that their only witness had lied under oath during the 1967 trial.

"They had a result from a polygrapher that was totally destructive of the prosecution," says Myron Beldock, Mr. Carter's attorney. "They were so desirous of prosecution that they were willing to pervert the entire process, by misrepresenting what they had found."

However, the polygrapher's written report was introduced at the trial. It said that Mr. Bello had told the truth in 1967, when he said he was outside the bar. The police accordingly told Mr. Bello that the lie detector "proved" he was outside, and he would be well-advised to revert to that version. (Mr. Beldock says today he thinks that Mr. Bello's final statement after the retrial, in which he said he simply didn't remember, was closest to the truth.)

The defence was never told about the polygrapher's oral reports saying Mr. Bello was telling the truth when he said he was inside the bar.

Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were again found guilty of murder.

AFTER THE RETRIAL

A few months later, Mr. Beldock, acting on a hunch, called the polygrapher to review his findings. He was stunned to learn that the test had concluded that Mr. Bello's on-the-street story was false. Why then did the written report say Mr. Bello was truthful in 1967?

"Because in 1967 Bello testified to the in-the-bar story," the polygrapher said.

"No, he didn't," Mr. Beldock replied, realizing the polygrapher had laboured under a crucial misunderstanding. "You got it backwards. His testimony in 1967 was that he was on the street."

Several other crucial facts also came out only after Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis had been sent back to prison.

For example, a juror came forward to say some jurors used racist terms for blacks; others said they didn't need to hear the evidence to convict Mr. Carter.

The defence also interviewed a friend of Ms. Valentine's, who says Ms. Valentine told her that she had seen one man, not two, running to a white car of a make different from Mr. Carter's (though similar to that of witness Bello).

But the most important revelation involved what has come to be called the Caruso file.

After Mr. Carter's first conviction was overturned, the prosecution formed a task force to determine whether there was enough evidence to warrant a new trial. Members were told not to take notes, an unusual instruction, but an investigator named Richard Caruso disobeyed.

His notes revealed that there was a code among the lead detective in the 1967 case, prosecution staff and some witnesses to identify witnesses who were extremely anti-Carter and avoid witnesses who were pro-Carter. He also found that physical evidence at the crime scenes, such as the location of tire marks, was inconsistent with the testimony of Ms. Valentine, the woman who lived above the bar.

His notes also reveal that after objecting for three months to such irregularities, he "demanded to be removed or expose. They said OK. But I would never be allowed to reveal/testify as I was privy to Pros. case. . . . Respect for [three colleagues] is why I didn't make more waves."

Two former members of the prosecutor's office told the defence about the Caruso file, but during the appeal process at the state level the defence chose not to introduce so as to reach federal court more quickly.

THE CANADIAN CONNECTION

The Hurricane is in part based on Lazarus and the Hurricane (Viking, 1991) by Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton, two Toronto men who moved to New Jersey to help Mr. Carter in the early 1980s. Both the film and the book weave together Mr. Carter's story with that of the two Canadians, as well as their housemate Lisa Peters (who married Mr. Carter but is now separated from him). Their improbable involvement was set in motion after Lesra Martin, a Brooklyn youth who lived with them, came across a book Mr. Carter had written in prison.

Lazarus and the Hurricane notes many inconvenient facts from 1967 that the 1976 prosecution simply chose not to deal with.

For example, Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis voluntarily appeared before a grand jury shortly after the killings. It concluded there was insufficient evidence against them and let them go.

Perhaps most crucially of all, on the night of the murders, the police questioned the two men -- but said they were "never suspects" and let them go.

Mr. Chaiton and Mr. Swinton quote Mr. Carter: "The prosecution claimed [in 1976] that on the night of the shootings they already had in hand...a positive car identification from two people, Bello and Valentine; they'd found one bullet and one shell in my car that matched the calibres of those used at the Lafayette Bar; . . . [Detective Vincent] DeSimone claimed that John and I gave him inconsistent statements of what we did that night; and we [were falsely said to have] failed our lie detector tests.

"If that was so, why did they release us, tell the press we weren't even suspects, go on to clear us before a grand jury and let me go to Argentina [for a boxing match], which has no extradition treaty with the United States?

"Would they have done that in the face of the mountain of incriminating evidence they later alleged they had in their possession that night?"

Indeed, the police arrested Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis only when, four months after the killings, they had in place the plank of their case that was most suspicious of all: Alfred Bello.

FREEDOM

Ultimately, the second conviction was overturned because the prosecution, which is required to disclose all its information to the defence, failed to reveal the full polygraph results. The accurate polygraph report could have been used to show Mr. Bello was lying.

This was one of the questions faced by appeal judges after 1976. In 1985, after losing several decisions, the defence argued the polygraph point before a federal judge, H. Lee Sarokin, who finally agreed that the test results could in fact have helped their case, so that the trial had been unfair.

The judge, noting the questionable nature of much of the evidence, further ruled that the prosecution's racial revenge theory pandered to prejudice.

"In essence, the prosecution was permitted to argue to the jury that defendants who were black were motivated to murder total strangers solely because they were white ...

"The fallacious premise of the argument becomes self-evident if it is reversed and applied toward whites. Would a jury be permitted to conclude that a white defendant would have expressed such a violent and indiscriminate rage without any evidence of personal racial animosity?"

The state appealed up to the Supreme Court, which ruled there was insufficient reason to hear the case. The 1966 indictments against Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were formally dismissed in 1988.

Leon Friedman, a law professor at Hofstra University in New York and the third defence lawyer after 1978, says the Canadians played a crucial, inspirational role: "These people came down and spent five years of their lives trying to get Rubin out. If these people were willing to devote themselves with such thoroughness and tenacity to the case, we as the lawyers [felt we] should do something comparable."

But in spite of their dedication, the Canadians' contribution was not what ultimately freed Mr. Carter, says Mr. Friedman. Rather, it was Myron Beldock's chance phone call to the polygrapher in January, 1977, when he learned that the polygrapher had drawn conclusions based on a misunderstanding.

"That's when it happened, and that was the key evidence in it all," he says with finality.

EPILOGUE

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter today resides in Toronto, where he heads the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (see interview on page B5).

John Artis was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1985 and returned to prison. Now a social worker, he works with troubled youth in Virginia.

Lesra Martin is now a lawyer in British Columbia. He will host a charity preview of The Hurricane in Kamloops.

The last time he was heard of, Alfred Bello was living in New Mexico under an assumed identity.

All Mr. Carter's prosecutors went on to successful careers in the N.J. justice system.

During the trial, Lewis Steel once had occasion to object when the prosecution cited race riots of the 1960s as a factor in the crime.

"Judge...we can't try America in this courtroom," he said, angrily.

But in a way they could.