“The story of the Hurricane,” as Bob Dylan once sang, has been told before. It is the tale of Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the famous middleweight boxer who was convicted and reprieved—twice—of a 1966 triple murder at a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. His wrongful-conviction story was immortalized in Dylan’s song “Hurricane,” from 1975—“All of Rubin’s cards were marked in advance / The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance”—and a movie starring Denzel Washington, from 1999, with similarly righteous tones. In 1985, a federal judge overturned Carter’s convictions, and also those of his co-defendant, John Artis; both men had served long sentences. But the ruling didn’t mean that the murder case was solved. Publicly revealing what actually happened that night could bring solace to many—and, possibly, open a huge can of worms.
“Nobody wanted the truth of my findings to come out—not the prosecution and not the defense,” an older man’s voice says…
