Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (born May 6, 1937) is a former American middleweight boxer, who competed from 1961 through 1966. Carter, along with John Artis, was convicted twice for the murder of three people which occurred at a bar in June 1966 in his hometown Paterson, New Jersey. He was later released after serving twenty years of three life sentences due to an appeal that claimed the motive the prosecution presented during the second trial was driven by race, and therefore discriminatory. The question of Carter’s actual guilt or innocence remains an issue.

Early life

Carter was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, the fourth of seven children. He acquired a criminal record that resulted in his being sentenced to a juvenile reformatory for assault and robbery shortly after his fourteenth birthday. This contradicts the age he gives in his autobiography, which claims he was sent to a detention center at age 11 for a 10 year sentence. Carter escaped from the reformatory in 1954 and joined the Army at age seventeen. A few months after completing infantry basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he was sent to West Germany, where he developed an interest in boxing. Carter was a poor soldier, and was court-martialed four times for charges ranging from insubordination to being AWOL. In May 1956, he was discharged as "unfit for military service", after having served 21 months of his three-year term of enlistment.