If this is your first book on former GTA resident Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, prepare to be inspired by his raw passion for justice. If you’re already familiar with Carter, there’s something bittersweet about Freeing David McCallum: The Last Miracle of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. You’re happy to have known him and then you’re sad all over again that he’s gone.
Carter was a former top-level pro boxer who served 19 years in American prisons for a triple murder he did not commit. When he was finally freed in 1985, he moved to Toronto, where he founded the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted in Toronto and devoted the rest of his life to rescuing victims of legal injustices.
This book tells of how Carter and author Ken Klonsky fought — and eventually won — freedom for David McCallum, who served 29 years behind bars in the U.S. after being wrongly convicted of abduction and murder.
There’s a familiar pattern to Carter’s work in the McCallum story. It was agonizingly slow. The McCallum wrongful conviction took 10 years to correct. Lawyers who would work pro bono had to be found. A private detective was hired. Witnesses were located and interviewed. Consciences were tweaked.
There’s something extra this time. Carter was dying of prostate cancer in the final stages of this one-last fight for justice. He penned an op-ed piece from his deathbed to keep the case alive.
“My aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward, to give the help that I received as a wrongly convicted man to another who needs such help now,” Carter wrote in the New York Daily News in February 2014. He died on April 20, 2014.
McCallum was 16 when he was locked up and 45 when he was exonerated and released in October 2014. Carter had already been dead for six months. The name of McCallum’s co-accused, William Stuckey, was also cleared. He had died in prison in 2001.
Carter somehow remained positive about life, despite all of his negative experiences. My favourite part of the book came after Carter’s uninsured house in west Toronto was gutted by fire, destroying all of his worldly possessions.
“It’s only stuff,” said Carter.
Then Carter added it was a miracle that his fluffy cat survived. That cat’s name? Phoenix.
Peter Edwards is the author of 16 books and a Toronto Star reporter who got to know Carter in his final years in Toronto