Movie Review

"Pistol shots rang out in the barroom night." The opening line of Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" provides a dramatic opening for the story of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, but it is far from the beginning of the story; in fact, where the story begins depends on who is telling it and what moral they want to draw from it. The facts of Rubin Carter's career and case are, at least on the surface, simple enough. On June 17, 1966, when two men and a woman were shot to death in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, Carter was a twenty-nine-year-old professional middleweight boxer. As a fighter he was known for his shaved head, sullen, menacing appearance, and explosive punching power. He had gained national recognition in 1962 with a televised one-round knockout of the highly regarded Florentino Fernandez, and the next year he had defeated welterweight champion Emile Griffith in a one-round technical knockout in a nontitle but nationally televised match. As impressive as those fights were, they do not tell the full story of Carter's boxing career. He had trouble with good defensive boxers, and at the height of his career, between the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1965, he lost decisions to Joey Archer, Joey Giardello, and Luis Rodriguez, three of the finest middleweight fighters of the decade. After the Rodriguez match, Carter declined sharply as a fighter, losing almost as many contests as he won, often to second- and third-rate boxers. Although he had fought for the title once, he had lost, and barring a radical change in his career, it is doubtful if he would have gotten another title shot had he not been imprisoned.	1
Carter's last fight, a loss to Rocky Rivero, was on August 6, 1966. But perhaps his thoughts were elsewhere that night, for in his hometown of Paterson he was a suspect in the Lafayette Bar and Grill killings. Though Carter and his friend John Artis were not identified by the surviving victims, and though both passed lie detector tests, they were eventually charged, tried, and convicted of the crime by an all-white jury and sentenced to life imprisonment. While in prison Carter wrote The Sixteenth Round (1974), an autobiography, which renewed interest in his case. By the mid-1970s, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter had become the American Dreyfus, imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, a victim of a racist society and a racist court system. Bob Dylan wrote a song about him and organized the Night of the Hurricane benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. Celebrities from Ellen Burstyn and Dyan Cannon to Johnny Cash and Stevie Wonder to Muhammad Ali and Coretta Scott King came to his defense, participating in marches, signing petitions, and generally getting out the word that Carter had been framed. In 1976 the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned his and Artis's convictions, and the two received a new trial. This time an integrated jury convicted them, sending them back to prison for life.	2
The case did not end there. A group of white Canadians and a black American teenager named Lesra Martin, convinced of Carter's innocence and America's guilt, came to the prisoner's defense and devoted their financial resources and considerable energy to it. Waging an international campaign to gain Carter's freedom, they exposed the racism and violence that had framed his life. Eventually Judge H. Lee Sarokin of the United States district court in Newark, New Jersey, overturned Carter's conviction, asserting that Rubin's trial had been characterized by "racism rather than reason, and concealment rather then disclosure." After nineteen years in prison, Carter was again a free man. The Passaic County prosecutor's office chose not to retry Carter.	. . .