GEN A MONDAY HURRICANE CARTER BLISS

Monday Update: Required reading: The NY Times Article on Chaos at the Justice Department. Do not miss this.  

If you didn't catch it, check out our football post yesterday where our secret theme was Gen A slang. 6-7.

For those of you not Gen A, think about this. Your childhood punishments were going to be early, not going to the party, being grounded at home.  For us Boomers, those are now our ideals.

The Ballad Of The Hurricane.

For you Gen X,Y,Z lawyers and Judges, there was a man named Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, from Newark New Jersey, who was the number one contender for the middle weight boxing crown in 1966 (back when that meant a whole lot).  Newark was erupting in flames over race-riots, and there was a triple murder at a bar downtown. In another part of town Rubin and some friends were stopped by the police ( or as Dylan sings, "Rubin was driving around with no idea what kind of shit was about to go down."). A known (white) felon was found in the bar with the bodies, but he said was just there to do a robbery when three black men came in and shot the place up. The police saw an opening to close the case and take down a hero to the African American community. One person in the bar survived the shooting, so they brought in Rubin for a show-up at the hospital. The surviving victim affirmatively stated that Rubin Carter was not the man. Nevertheless, with the use of white cooperating witnesses found at the scene of the murder, the all-white jury convicted Rubin Hurricane Carter when he was at the peak of his career. That set off one of the saddest legal odysseys in American Criminal Law. 

Carter was convicted in 1967. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1976. Carter was convicted at a re-trial in 1976, that was if anything, more tainted by racism, prosecutorial misconduct and discovery violations. A federal habeas petition landed on the desk of US District Judge H. Lee Saorkin of the New Jersey District Court- a heroic judge. Saorkin issued a scathing opinion stating that Carter's conviction was "predicated on racism not reason" and "based on concealment rather than disclosure [of exculpatory evidence].  Judge Saorkin ordered Carter's immediate release. NJ Appealed to the Third Circuit and lost, and the US Supreme Court, back when defendants had a chance there, denied cert. The case was then dismissed with prejudice. Carter moved to Canada (can you blame him?) where he spent his remaining years as an advocate for the wrongly convicted. He died in 2014, a majority of his adult life taken from him by a racist criminal justice system in the greatest country in the world (note the sarcasm in the last part of that sentence.)

 We once played this song in closing argument. In federal court. Really. It is one of our favourites, and it gets you thinking about the "greatest" justice system on earth, that took a man's life, and destroyed it. 

Our favourite line: Dylan singing about the use of an informant: "How can the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool's hand?"