'Going the Distance' with Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

Onetime seemingly unstoppable boxing champion, victim of a false conviction for a triple homicide, and spokesperson for the wrongfully incarcerated, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter is a controversial twentieth century icon.

Dr. Carter, a former middleweight prizefighter whose 1967 imprisonment for a triple homicide at a Paterson, New Jersey, bar became a cause célèbre in the 1970s for in- dividuals like Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali, was released from prison in 1985 by a federal judge who cited a conviction predicated on “an appeal to racism rather than reason.”

Dr. Carter says that his true freedom was actually achieved within prison walls after he chose to focus not on his release but rather on personal transformation through the study of religious and philosophical texts, a process conveyed in his new book with transcendent wisdom if not concision. Carter also discusses his efforts in Canada to secure the release of similarly wrongly convicted people through Innonence Inter- national, which he founded in 2004.

In his new book, Dr. Carter tells of the metaphoric and physical prisons he has survived: his poverty- stricken childhood, his troubled adolescence and early adulthood, his 19-year imprisonment with 10 years in solitary confinement, and the knowledge that his life was forever altered by injustice. A spiritual as well as factual autobiography, his is not a comfortable story or a comfortable philosophy, but he offers hope for those who have none, and his words are a call to action for those who abhor injustice.

Innocence International (II) seeks to work as a supply depot working in close cooperation with the many Innocence projects throughout the world. Innocence International is in the process of becoming the clearing house for the many miscarriages of justices perpetrated against the wrongfully convicted. When an innocence project, whether in Spokane, Washington or Brussels, Belgium, contacts II with a case of wrongful conviction, II will investigate immediately. Once convinced of the factual innocence of the prisoner, II will utilize all its resources, such as speak- ers, lawyers, investigators, assisting the local innocence project and seeking the freedom of the wrongfully convicted.