Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, the US boxer died

Former American middleweight boxer, Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter died on 20 April 2014 at his home in Toronto, Canada following a battle with prostate cancer. He was 76.

He remained in jail for about two decades on the charge of murder of three white people in New Jersey in 1966. His conviction caused an international outcry.

Rubin Carter’s tenure in jail  
• After being jailed, he was freed through a petition of habeas corpus after spending 19 years in prison of New Jersey. He was freed for good in 1985 after his convictions were overturned by a federal judge Sarokin
• He was charged and convicted on the basis of the evidence of two prosecution witnesses, who on that day were attempting to commit burglary near the location of murders.
• He was briefly freed in 1976 after the witnesses recanted their statements in 1974. But later he was retried and convicted again in 1976 after one of the prosecution witnesses withdrew his recantation.

About Rubin Carter
• Rubin Carter was nicknamed as Hurricane on the basis of his aggressive style of boxing and punching power
• He served the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted as its executive director from 1993 to 2005
• His autobiography, titled The Sixteenth Round was published in 1975 by Warner Books, which inspired Bob Dylan song Hurricane in the same year
• In 1999, a film named The Hurricane was also made based on the book and Carter. Denzel Washington played the role of Carter in the film