Rubin Carter was a boxer on the threshold of the Middleweight Championship, with all the celebrity and wealth that would have conferred, when he was picked off the streets of Paterson, New Jersey by the police and accused of first degree murder in a bar room shooting. It was 1966, when America was gripped by racial rioting and burgeoning Black Power movements. Rubin faced an all-white jury. He was convicted. Liberal America adopted the campaign to release him in the 1970s - Candice Bergen, Mohammad Ali and Bob Dylan all protested for his release - but he remained in jail until 1985. Then, one man doggedly self-educated in the law finally achieved what years of high-profile lobbying had not: he freed Rubin Carter and righted one of the most significant cases of American injustice of the 20th century.
This is the biography of modern America's great flaw: race relations; of a troublesome but gifted man, a paratrooper, a boxer, from the poorer side of the tracks.
Now a major film starring Denzel Washington.
