It is possible that Carter is guilty, but it has never been proven.
Somebody mentioned this site stating it was factual.
http://www.graphicwitness.com/carter/
EX. This story about how Carter lost the sight in his right eye has been around for years. Although it is not documented with official records, it seems believeable.
This is not a fact but a rumor, not corraborated anywhere else. It is pure conjecture, in other words BS. It could be true, but it is not a fact.
It is nothing of the sort. It is nothing but opinion, that eventually shows itself to be propoganda. Every other article I linked to on the site was the same thing. Taking one bit of information and making it into something completely opposite of the truth.
Another contention of the site was that Carter's career was on the skids when the murder took place. He was fighting top contenders in their home rings and countries and losing split decisions. I know a couple of people that saw those fights and thought he was robbed in some of those decision. He knocked down Johnny Morris twice in Jan. 1966, but somehow lost the decision. I am not talking about his Championship bout which he lost (the movie depiction is BS).
The murders took place on June 17, 1966. Carter was allowed to go to Venezuela and fight Rocky Rivera almost two months later, August 6, 1966. Do the police usually let persons of interest leave the country?
Mr. Chaiton and Mr. Swinton quote Mr. Carter: "The prosecution claimed [in 1976] that on the night of the shootings they already had in hand...a positive car identification from two people, Bello and Valentine; they'd found one bullet and one shell in my car that matched the calibres of those used at the Lafayette Bar; . . . [Detective Vincent] DeSimone claimed that John and I gave him inconsistent statements of what we did that night; and we [were falsely said to have] failed our lie detector tests.
"If that was so, why did they release us, tell the press we weren't even suspects, go on to clear us before a grand jury and let me go to Argentina [for a boxing match], which has no extradition treaty with the United States?
"Would they have done that in the face of the mountain of incriminating evidence they later alleged they had in their possession that night?"
Indeed, the police arrested Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis only when, four months after the killings, they had in place the plank of their case that was most suspicious of all: Alfred Bello.
And the bullets in the car? As a front-page article in The New York Times noted in 1974, there were irregularities in how the bullets were recorded at the police station. The police said they found them the night of the murders, yet they were not logged with the property clerk until five days later.
As for Paul Alberta, the reporter who said in 1976 he witnessed the recovery of the bullets, he never wrote about this event in any of the stories he wrote about the Carter case over the years -- even though the bullets were the subject of great journalistic interest. Such a story would have made Mr. Alberta's career. The nature of his relationship with the local police force, the defence also noted, is suggested in the fact that he fetched coffees for the officers at the station, and was particularly close to the officer who said he found the bullets.
- THE WITNESSES: All witnesses who spoke to the police the night of the murder said the killers were tall, light-skinned blacks without beards. However, Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis resembled Mutt and Jeff -- Mr. Carter was shorter and darker, with a shaved head and thick goatee. Even the lead detective at the 1967 trial noted "the description of the assailants is not even close."
Moreover, right after the murders, Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were taken by police to the hospital room of William Marins, the surviving shooting victim. He said they were not the killers.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/9962/Carter.html
In both appeals the higher courts ruled that the prosecution had witheld evidence in both trials. Bello the key prosecution witness, the only one in the second trial to identify Carter and Artis, had failed parts of his polygraph numerous times. According to the polygraph analyst he was telling the truth when he stated he was inside the bar, but Bello's testimony at the trial was that Bello was outside the bar.
But the most important revelation involved what has come to be called the Caruso file.
After Mr. Carter's first conviction was overturned, the prosecution formed a task force to determine whether there was enough evidence to warrant a new trial. Members were told not to take notes, an unusual instruction, but an investigator named Richard Caruso disobeyed.
His notes revealed that there was a code among the lead detective in the 1967 case, prosecution staff and some witnesses to identify witnesses who were extremely anti-Carter and avoid witnesses who were pro-Carter. He also found that physical evidence at the crime scenes, such as the location of tire marks, was inconsistent with the testimony of Ms. Valentine, the woman who lived above the bar.
His notes also reveal that after objecting for three months to such irregularities, he "demanded to be removed or expose. They said OK. But I would never be allowed to reveal/testify as I was privy to Pros. case. . . . Respect for [three colleagues] is why I didn't make more waves."
The prosecution's two key witnesses have serious credibility issues. The transcripts for both trials have been destroyed. He is most likely innocent.
The OP stated guilty people don't fight for their innocence. That is not true, Roger Keith Coleman was convicted of raping and killing his sister in law in 1982, he fought the conviction for ten years until he was executed in 1992. DNA testing 2006 proved fairly conclusively, he was most likely the killer. The chance he was not the killer were 1 in 19 million.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,181542,00.html
I used to think that maybe Coleman was innocent, but eventually realized he was scamming people. The blood on his work clothes matched the victim, and he had been convicted of attempting to rape another woman with similiar features to his sister in-law. The problems in my mind were the two seman samples which couldn't be identified at the time of the original conviction and his alibis corroborated by his friends. When the first DNA tests were performed in 1990 and made it 98-99.8% likely he was the killer, that was too much evidence to sustain his claims of innoncence.
There were numerous differences in the Coleman and Carter cases. All the serious evidence pointed at Coleman in his case and all the evidence in his favor turned out to be based on false testimony. All the serious evidence in the Carter case points to his innocence. All the evidence against him has turned out to be either manipulated or based on false or unreliable testimony.
The state has a vital interest to sustain the belief of fair trials and convictions. We have to view all trials through that prism to see reality. Emotions and assumptions should not rule out out thought process in these matters. Too many posters read some of these websites and think they are getting the "real" story, but they are being manipulated. Think people!
What's really sad is people like Larry Elder and Steve Adubuto write articles only protraying one side of the case (Deal's). Deal's own site mentions that Artis and Carter did pass the original polygraph test on the grounds that they did not commit the murders. The Police concluded Carter knew who the killer or killers were. There is really very little evidence they were the killers. Two of the surving victims (one died a month later) didn't identify them. The two who did identify them in the original trial recanted their testimony after the first trial. Bello flipped again during the second trial. Bradley recanted his original testimony at the second trial. Secondly, Bello got a $10,000 reward for his information in addition to having most of his criminal charges dropped for his testimony.
/www.graphicwitness.com/carter/lieletter4.html
Make up your own mind. However, be skeptical and read the Prosecution's case for the last appeal and realize how flimsy it is. There were supposedly three witnesses of the killers and Bello was the only one that identified Carter and Artis. Notice how painstakingly they put a positive spin Bello's financial incentive to recant. The man is known to lie for personal gain. No mention of Bradley's recant, nor Marins or Tanis failure to identify either Carter or Artis . Valentine the other eyewitness of the car was engaged at the time of the murder to a police officer she would eventually marry. Read the comments about how the shell casings were observed by a local newspaper reporter (Deal's old boss Paul Alberta), another detective, and Mrs. Valentine/Ms. Graham. Why so much detail about how the casings were discovered? Due to the fact that the shell casings were not registered into the precint log until five days after the shooting and arrival of the car.
http://graphicwitness.com/carter/brief/2-Statement-of-Facts.pdf
It is possible that Carter is guilty, but it has never been proven.
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mdana
16 years ago
More for anyone interested.
Valentine's testimony in the first trial.
http://www.graphicwitness.com/carter/pdfs/Valentine--1967-Trial.pdf
It directly contradicts Bello's testimony that the two African-Americans leaving the Lafayette were brandishing their weapons and laughing while leaving the bar before entering their car. She states she saw no weapons and heard nothing from them.
Another thing I find interesting is that the first trial had an all-white jury (one West Indian man misleadingly refered to as Black man was an alternate and not used in the final jury) and the second trial had only 2 African-Americans. As of the census of 2000, the racial makeup of the city was 32.90% African American and 30.20% White. Now the racial demographics of the city may have changed drastically in the last 30-40 years, but from the news articles I have read of the case the African-American population in the city was considerable during the two trials. Many of the Anti-Carter websites like to point out there were 377 potential jurors for the first trial and 250 for the second trial, but how many were African-American? If the juror pool was 10% African-American, then it wasn't possible to get a jury of peers. People must also understand that racial attitudes back then were much more bigoted than they are today. I used to hear people called the n-word all the time in the 1970s in the Midwest and California. It wasn't just in the South, these attitutudes were prevalent all over the country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterson%2C_New_Jersey
http://members.shaw.ca/cartermyths/
After reading numerous different accounts of the trial and the investigation, it is amazing how many different reporters and writers have either accepted the Hurricane is innocent or guilty script and left out any inconvienent details to that narrative. Not many accounts look at the whole story and try to explain it objectively. Carter sounds like a miserable man who likes to embelish and outright lie about his life and story. He certainly has a violent and criminal past outside the ring even after 1966 (if the allegations leveled by a female former supporter are true-the criminal charges were dropped due to lack of evidence). There is certainly considerable doubt on if he is innocent in the Lafayette Bar murder case, but that is not the criteria to reach a guilty verdict in a criminal case.
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Voyager_I
16 years ago
The best evidence is circumstantial. Finger prints, the murder weapon, and DNA at the scene are circumstantial. The only type of evidence that isn't circumstantial is an eye witness or a recording. So please stop ruling out a person because all the prosecution had was circumstantial evidence.
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dsnyder1
10 years ago
The website admits,by your own quote,the story about Carter's eye is only a rumor.Evidence of Carter's guilt is strong enough that two juries a decade apart came back with guilty verdicts.Despite the claim in the movie,the second jury had two black members.
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