' How can the life of such a man

Be in the palm of some fool's hand?

To see him obviously framed

Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed,

to live in land where justice is a game

.'

That is the story of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, a middleweight boxer who, nearing the peak of his career, was wrongfully arrested and subsequently convicted by an all-white jury for the murder of three white men in a New Jersey bar based on the testimony of two petty criminals who later admitted that they lied under police pressure.

After a long legal battle and spending 19 years in prison, his conviction was overturned. The heart of Carter's story is his resilience, his pride and his will to transform himself, through his prison experience, into the happier, reflective man he has become, a proponent of racial harmony.

The story is also about how people of different cultures, ages and races transcended their differences and helped Carter regain his freedom.

Many Malaysians would, by now be familiar with the story after Denzel Washington's superb performance in the Norman Jewison film 'Hurricane' released last year.

I had a passing interest in the story after listening to Bob Dylan's epic song 'Hurricane', from the 1976 album 'Desire', which I personally feel is Dylan's last great album.

Not being in America at that time, I was only informed of the case by the eight minute-plus song, unusually long in popular music, which retells the story as seen from the eyes of Dylan after listening to Carter's version.

As in his other great songs, it revealed the gifted wordsmith that Dylan is, managing remarkably to keep the verses in rhyme almost throughout the song.

Not to mention the great music which deceptively starts with a gentle strumming of the acoustic guitar in the first few bars. Dylan was moved to immortalise the story of Hurricane in music after Carter sent him a copy of his book The Sixteenth Round .

The singer visited him in prison in 1975. He said, "The first time I saw him, I felt knowing one thing ... I realised that the man's philosophy and my philosophy were running down the same road".

National attention

With the song, Carter's legal battle caught national attention and he became a cause clbre in the civil rights movement. I assumed that for Dylan to be strongly convinced of Carter's innocence and to commit it on 'record', he must have checked all his facts.

Well, almost. In " Dylan - a biography " by Bob Spitz (WW Norton & Company, 1989), it is recounted that in his haste to get the record out, Dylan had taken certain liberties with the musical retelling of the incident - placing the wrong witness at the scene of the crime - a minor oversight which threatened to bury him in litigation.

On the advice of his counsel he re-recorded the song with a corrected lyric. However, in 1979 he was sued in a US District Court in Florida by Patty Valentine who appears in a recurring role throughout the song.

But the case holds little significance as far as the Bob Dylan story is concerned and the outcome was not mentioned. The book, written with great wit and style described how Dylan hilariously dodged questions from attorneys in court, the way he usually did with journalists.

However my belief in Carter's innocence was somewhat shaken upon reading another part of the biography in which the author cast aspersions on Carter's truthfulness. This was in the recounting of an incident during a concert benefit to raise money for Carter's legal team at Madison Square Garden head-lined by Dylan.

Despite having the benefit of being published four years after Carter's conviction was overturned by a federal judge, the book made the serious omission of not mentioning this, or of the intense legal battle and relentless effort of his friends that led to his release.

Nor was there any account of the positive changes in Rubin's personality from years of reflection, reading and studying in prison.

Troubled childhood

When I finally saw the film last year on a pasar malam VCD, and then researching the subject further thereafter, I was happy that my doubts were finally laid to rest.

Interestingly one of the informative pieces is an exclusive 1975 interview by Penthouse magazine (from the Net, of course). There are a couple of sites that unconvincingly try to sustain the guilty verdict.

Like many black children growing up in American cities in the 50s, Rubin Carter had a troubled childhood. At 11, he was sent to the State Home for Boys after he attacked a white man with a broken glass and stole his watch.

Carter claimed that the man was trying to molest one of his friends. When he was old enough he ran away from the Home to join the army in 1954 and served in Germany where he excelled in boxing.

Upon returning to Paterson, New Jersey, he was picked up by the police and compelled to serve out the remaining 10 months of his sentence at the state home. He became a professional middle weight boxer in 1961, winning a string of impressive successes.

Carter was confident, but embittered by the role he believed race had played in his run-ins with the authorities. Now that he was successful, he was in a position to speak out.

In an interview in 1964, he railed against police occupations of black neighbourhoods and voiced his outspoken support of self-defence against police brutality.

" in Paterson that's just the way things go. If you are black you might as well not show up on the street 'less you wanna draw the heat."

In June 1966, three whites were murdered in a Paterson bar and Rubin Carter, known to the Paterson police for his civil rights activities, was swept up in the dragnet.

The police already chased and lost a white car similar to the one driven by the murderers as they fled the city but only one - Rubin Carter's, was brought to the scene of the crime to confront the lynch-mob hysteria of white neighbours and witnesses.

Even so, no one, either witnesses or the only surviving victim identified Carter or his young companion in the car, John Artis, as the murderers. After 17 hours of grilling by police and after Carter passed a lie-detector test, the two men were released.

Five months later, in October 1966, Carter and Artis were arrested and charged with the murders. On the testimony of two white petty thieves and ex-convicts, Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley.

Carter and Artis were imprisoned, and in May 1967 they were brought to trial. There followed two weeks of courtroom drama packed with racial tension: black defendants confronted by a white judge, a white prosecutor waving the blood soaked clothes of the white victims, and an all-white jury chosen from a community informed by a racially inflamed local press.

font color=800000> Parachuted in

' All of Rubin's cards were marked in advance

The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance

The judge made Rubin's witnesses drunkards from the slums

To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum

And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger

No one doubted that he pulled the trigger '

The result was that both defendants received triple life sentences with Carter's set to run consecutively!

In the Penthouse interview, Carter asserted that the judge was parachuted in from another county because none in Passaic County (where Paterson is) would touch the case knowing that it was a farce.

And that was Judge Samuel Larner's first criminal trial! Carter said he acted like a prosecutor from the bench, and once he convicted him (Carter), he was transferred back to Essex County and was put in civil law because he did not have enough criminal trial experience.

' Now all the criminals in their coats and ties

Are free to drink Martinis and watch the sun rise

While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell

An innocent man in a living hell....

'

But in September 1974 the prosecution's key witnesses, Bello and Bradley recanted their testimony, explaining that they had lied in exchange for rewards of $10,500 offered by the police and promises of leniency for robbery charges.

Racist bullies

And with that, came to light the suppression of evidence by the police. The New York Times published a front-page article that depicted Carter's prosecution as the work of racist bullies. Bradley admitted to the newspaper, "There is no doubt Carter was framed".

In March 1976, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Carter and Artis and they were released on bail. But months later, Bello again reversed his testimony.

Carter and Artis were sent back to prison. Though he had carefully studied the law for years, including every detail of his own case, after his second defeat, Carter gave away his law books and began to study literature instead.

In 1982, the state supreme court affirmed the convictions with a 4-3 vote. But Carter's reaction exemplified his newly serene nature. In a note to the judges who voted in the minority, he said:

"The ancient philosopher Diogenes spent his whole life searching for one honest man. I have found three. Thank you".

Much of the film 'Hurricane' is about the unrelenting efforts of a group of Canadians - Lisa Peters, Terry Swinton and Sam Chaiton - leaders of an entrepreneurial commune who eventually helped Carter gain freedom a decade later by devoting countless hours, resources and nearly expert analyses to his legal team.

By a 'Simple Twist of Fate', to borrow the title of another Dylan song, Carter's out-of-print biography had fallen into the hands of 15-year-old Lazarus Martin whom the Canadians had adopted from his impoverished Brooklyn neighbourhood.

They lost

They educated him and taught him to read. Carter's Sixteenth Round was Martin's first book.

As I remember it from the movie, one day, Lazarus's foster family took him to a second hand book market in Toronto. They watched a truck empty its load onto the floor, the books slowly piling into a small mountain.

After all the books were seemingly emptied, one last copy tumbled out and lay on top of the pile. Lazarus simply picked it up and it turned out to be The Sixteenth Round .

He had that look of disbelief when told that it cost 25 cents. In the weeks that followed, Lazarus, who was learning to read, struggled with the book but was mesmerised by Carter's story and he absorbed himself with it day and night.

He then shared Carter's tale with his adopted family and that was the beginning of their quest to help Carter to freedom.

The film was based largely on Chaiton and Swinton's book, ' Lazarus and the Hurricane: The untold story of the freeing of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter '.

In a federal appeal in 1985, Judge H Lee Sarokin overturned his conviction and said that Carter's earlier trials had been 'based on racism rather than reason and concealment rather than disclosure'.

Carter and his Canadian friends had become so close that he went to live with them at the commune.

He is now director of the Toronto-based Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted and the Atlanta-based Southern Centre for Human Rights.

Asked if he was bitter of the injustice he suffered, he said, "There is no bitterness. If I was bitter, that would mean they won".