Wrongful conviction in N.J. and the legacy of Hurricane Carter

By Connie Hassett-Walker

November marks the 33-year anniversary of the overturning of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter's conviction for a triple murder at the Lafayette Bar & Grill in Paterson, New Jersey.

After two separate trials and convictions, and spending nearly two decades in prison, Carter was released after his conviction was overturned in 1985, when the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey in Newark granted Carter's and a co-defendant's writ of habeas corpus. This meant that the court agreed with the defendants that they had been unlawfully imprisoned because, among other things, at retrial the prosecution had unconstitutionally appealed to racial prejudice.

A New Jersey native, Carter's story has many highs and lows. He was born in Clifton and grew up in Paterson. An early scuffle with the law as a teenager landed him in Jamesburg State Home for Boys from which he would escape, fleeing to join the Army. There he began training to be a boxer. After another arrest for purse-snatching, and four years incarceration at Trenton State prison, Carter became a professional boxer. Known for his ferocious style and power punches, he earned the nickname "Hurricane."

In 1995 Carter was inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame.

Bob Dylan wrote a song, "Hurricane," about Carter's plight. And of course there was the 1999 moviestarring Denzel Washington, which painted Carter as a tragic hero of sorts; a good man at heart who did bad things because of childhood pain, who fell victim to a racist justice system. But in an article for The Star-Ledger, columnist Paul Mulshine wrote a scathing review not only of the movie's flattering portrayal of Carter, but also of journalists and others who didn't fact-check Carter's background story.

The ferocity of his boxing reflected Carter's anger and frustration over racial segregation and police treatment of African Americans residents and black neighborhoods in Paterson. He was up front about advocating violence.

In an interview with the Saturday Evening PostCarter reportedly said "I don't enjoy hitting or hurting people, not unless they mess with me. Then I enjoy it.... If you mess with me, I'm going to try to kill you."

After his release, Carter moved to Canada and got active in advocacy for wrongly convicted individuals. He died in 2014 from prostate cancer.

The good and bad of Carter's life story aside, his fame shines a spotlight on the issue of wrongful conviction and, sometimes, exoneration. According to a National Registry of Exonerations, in 2016 there were 166 individuals nationwide that had their wrongful convictions set aside, for a variety of crimes including homicide, robbery, and sex crimes.

A 2017 story in NJ.com provided details on three of the men, all from New Jersey, noting that "while New Jersey has far fewer overturned convictions than many other states, the average exonerated New Jersey prisoner spent 10 years behind bars before they were set free."

New Jersey has so far experienced fewer overturned convictions than other states. But the stories that make the news are haunting, like the case of Byron Halsey who would ultimately receive a $12.5 million settlement for being wrongfully convicted of killing his girlfriend's young children. As NJ.com reported in 2015, Halsey would spend over two decades in prison before DNA evidence cleared him of the crime and implicated another man, a neighbor and co-worker who had testified against Halsey during his trial.

Wrongful convictions happen for a variety of reasons, including eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, and prosecutorial misconduct (coercing witnesses, hiding evidence from the defense). When the wrong person gets locked up for a crime, there is no justice and a new victim is created. While groups like the Innocence Project work hard to overturn miscarriages of justice, and exonerees may win large civil settlements, no amount of money can get an individual back the years they lost.

In April 2018, The Star-Ledger editorial board published a story about Attorney General Gurbir Grewal taking up an investigation of how Passaic County Prosecutor Camelia Valdes bungled a case of two now-free men, Eric Kelley and Ralph Lee. According to the article, Prosecutor Valdes "[refused] to change course even after DNA evidence discovered in 2014 exonerated the two men in prison". AG Grewel appointed James Zazzali, a former chief justice of the state's Supreme Court, to drill down and determine what went wrong.

This would be a good thing, as even more terrible to contemplate is that a miscarriage of justice like this one could happen again. As they say, those who don't learn from their mistakes are likely to repeat them.

Connie Hassett-Walker is an associate professor in Kean University's Department of Criminal Justice. She is the author of "Guns on the Internet" (2018, Routledge/Taylor & Francis).

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