Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a legendary boxer who spent 19 years in prison on a wrongful murder conviction, died this morning at home in Toronto.
He was 76 years old.
According to friend John Artis, Carter passed away from prostate cancer, a disease for which he was being treated for an unknown period of time.
In 1966, Carter was convicted charges of fatally shooting two men and a woman in a Paterson, New Jersey restaurants. It took nearly two decades, but both jury verdicts were eventually overturned on different grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.
Prior to his legal battles and imprisonment, Carter was known as a fearsome fighter.
He narrowly lost a fight for the middleweight championship in 1964.
Carter rose to national acclaim during his lengthy battle to clear his name, with Amnesty International describing him as a "prisoner of conscience" at one point.
Bob Dylan also penned a hit track title "Hurricane" that championed his innocence and vilified the cops and became a Top 40 hit in 1976.
In 1999, Denzel Washington portrayed Carter on the big screen in a movie also titled Hurricane.
After his release, Carter moved to Toronto, where he served as the executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted from 1993 to 2005. He received two honorary doctorates for his work.
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