I have an RIP this week. This is going to be shorter than it should be, because there is something I want to get to, something that actually is related.Rubin Carter died of complications from prostate cancer on April 20 at his home in Toronto, Canada. He was 76.
If don't know the name, maybe it's because remember him as "Hurricane" Carter. A professional boxer, his career was cut short when he was falsely convicted of murder in a shooting at a bar in Paterson, New Jersey in 1966.
He won a new trial but was convicted again and ultimately spent 19 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. He finally got out in 1985.After his release, he became the first director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted.
That's all I'm going to say for now, but I do intend to return to this next week. Because his life, his case, raises all sorts of issues about our criminal justice system, and not only about the racism that figured in his case. I want to raise some of the questions about the wrongly convicted, about wondering how many people are in prison today who shouldn't be, who are innocent, and now sit behind bars only because they lacked the financial resources to defend themselves adequately, about how feeble the supposed presumption of innocence becomes when an individual stands alone against the state.
But that's for next week. For the moment, I will just say: RIP, Rubin Carter.
Sources cited in links:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/20/us/rubin-hurricane-carter-obit/
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