Rubin Carter: Counted Out Again

Here comes the story of the Hurricane,

The man the authorities came to blame

For somethin' that he never done.

--From Bob Dylan's song Hurricane

That was for a jury to decide, and a year ago a phalanx of literary and show biz personalities joined Dylan in seeking a new trial for Rubin ("Hurricane") Carter, a former middleweight boxer convicted of murder who, with his friend John Artis, had been in prison for nine years. The two finally got their second chance after the New Jersey Supreme Court threw out their convictions because the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence affecting the reliability of its two prime witnesses (TIME, March 29). Last week the second trial ended, and Carter, 39, and Artis, 30, sat stoically with their hands folded as the forewoman of the jury rose to read the verdict: "Guilty."

White Dodge. For 31 days the jurors had heard from 76 witnesses the story of the killings and subsequent events. On June 17, 1966, two black men armed with shotgun and pistol shot up a white working-class bar in Paterson, N.J., killing the bartender and two of three customers. A witness identified a white Dodge as looking like the getaway car, and a search of it turned up a bullet and shotgun shell. Carter and Artis were in the car, but it was not until four months later that they were charged with the murders. That was when two petty thieves--Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley--claimed that while trying to break into a nearby factory, they had seen Carter and Artis flee the bar. The burglars' testimony was central to the state's case and helped send Carter and Artis to prison for life.

Then in 1974 Fred Hogan, an investigator for the New Jersey public defender's office, and New York Times Reporter Selwyn Raab got Bello and Bradley to say that they had lied in their identification because the police, as Bello put it, had "promised they'd take care of me if I got jammed up again." Last March a hearing was held, and the prosecution introduced for the first time a taped interrogation of Bello that revealed the police had indeed promised to help the two in various criminal cases against them. The defense, which had been assured during the cross-examination of witnesses in the first trial that there had been no such deals, now argued that the new information was grounds for another trial. The state supreme court agreed and reversed the convictions.

But at the second trial the new Passaic County prosecutor, Burrell Ives Humphreys, and his "Carter task force" had a few surprises in store for the defense. A major stunner: Alfred Bello took the stand and calmly recanted his recantation. Calling it a lie, Bello pointed to Carter and Artis as the two men he had seen leaving the bar. Hogan and Raab, he said, had offered him bribes to recant. Moreover, two former defense witnesses backed up the prosecution's contention that either Carter or his former lawyer tried to cook up a phony alibi; they testified this time that they were not with Carter at the time of the shoot-up.

Racial Horror. Trying to poke holes in the state's case, defense attorneys argued that the police were so anxious to get a conviction that they played fast and loose with the facts linking Carter and Artis to the killings. The lawyers went so far as to present evidence suggesting that the cops could have planted the bullet and shotgun shell in the Dodge. The witnesses who undercut Carter's alibi, they charged, had been linked to the police. But the defense was badly wounded by one prosecution coup: the judge allowed the state to argue that Carter and Artis had killed the three whites in order to avenge the murder six hours earlier of a black tavern owner whose stepson was a friend of Carter's.

In his summation. Carter's lawyer, Myron Beldock, countered that such a tactic was a "racial horror that feeds on the basest, most dirty part of all of us." He asked the jury to reject the prosecution's theory of Carter as a "mad, racist killer" bent on revenge. Instead, the jury rejected Beldock's case, and Hurricane Carter and John Artis were led back to jail to await sentencing and the start of a new round of appeals.

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