Biography
John Artis was a 19-year-old with no criminal record, convicted alongside Carter; he stood by Carter's innocence and his own for decades.
On June 17, 1966, three people were shot to death at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a nationally ranked middleweight boxer, and John Artis, a young man with no criminal record, were arrested and — on the testimony of two petty criminals, Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley — convicted of the triple murder in 1967 and sentenced to life. No forensic evidence linked either man to the killings.
Bello and Bradley recanted in 1974, but a 1976 retrial again convicted both men. The case became an international cause célèbre — championed in Bob Dylan's 1975 song "Hurricane" and by a broad civil-rights and labor coalition — as an emblem of racist wrongful conviction. In November 1985, federal judge H. Lee Sarokin overturned the convictions, finding the prosecution had been "predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure." Carter was freed, and the charges were dismissed in 1988.
