Prizefighter Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whose career was cut short by a wrongful murder conviction in New Jersey, died Sunday at his home in Toronto, Canada, the New York Times reports. He was 76.
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The cause of death was prostate cancer, his friend and onetime co-defendant, John Artis, told the New York Times. He was being treated in Toronto, where he founded a nonprofit organization, Innocence International, to work to free prisoners it considered wrongly convicted, the report says.
He was convicted twice on the same charges of fatally shooting two men and a woman in a Paterson, N.J., tavern in 1966, the Times writes. But both verdicts, however, were overturned on grounds of misconduct by prosecutors, the report says. He was imprisoned for 19 years before the charges were dropped.
His story was depicted in the 1999 movie, The Hurricane, in which he was portrayed by Denzel Washington, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the performance, the Times writes. The movie, however, came under fire for being simplistic and riddled with historical inaccuracies, the report says.
Read more at the New York Times.
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