Rubin Carter

Rubin Hurricane Carter (1937 to 2014) was an American middleweight boxer who was wrongfully convicted of a triple homicide at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, and spent 18 years and 4 months in prison before his release on a petition of habeas corpus. He and his co-accused John Artis were convicted in 1967 and given life sentences, which were overturned in 1985 on the basis of prosecutor misconduct and dubious eyewitness testimony. His autobiography The Sixteenth Round, written in prison, appeared in 1974 and inspired Bob Dylan's 1975 song Hurricane and the 1999 film The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington. From 1993 to 2005 he served as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, later renamed Innocence Canada.