Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

Rubin Carter was born in Clifton, New Jersey, the fourth of seven children. After a turbulent youth in Paterson, Carter joined the US Army in 1954, serving with the 11th Airborne Division in West Germany, where he took up boxing. Turning professional in 1961, Carter was nicknamed 'The Hurricane' for his shaved head, menacing goatee, and explosive, ferocious punching power. In December 1963, he shocked the boxing world by knocking out world welterweight champion Emile Griffith in two minutes and thirteen seconds of the first round.

Carter's athletic career was shattered on 17 June 1966 when two Black men shot three white people dead at the Lafayette Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. Despite having an alibi, passing lie detector tests, and having no gunpowder residue on his hands, Carter and nineteen-year-old John Artis were arrested, framed with perjured eyewitness testimony, and convicted by an all-white jury, receiving two life sentences.

Maintaining his innocence with ferocious moral dignity, Carter refused to wear prison clothes, eat prison food, or behave like an inmate. His 1974 autobiography, The Sixteenth Round, inspired Bob Dylan's protest anthem 'Hurricane' and worldwide campaigns for his release. In November 1985, US District Court Judge H. Lee Sarokin overturned his conviction, ruling it had been 'predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason.' Moving to Toronto, Carter served as Executive Director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), fighting tirelessly for the exoneration of innocent prisoners worldwide.