Free Republic

Believe me: If my mother-in-law didn’t live with us, the sights and sounds of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) would never pollute my home.But for much of her life, there were only 13 channels, so she habitually switches to the state broadcaster when she can’t find anything else to watch.That’s how I heard, on Easter Sunday morning, via various noises making their way from our living room television into my office, that Hurricane Carter had died.Judging solely by the anchor’s somber tone, one would be forgiven for concluding that the deceased had been some great Canadian statesman or artist, not...

---SNIP-- After almost two decades of judge-shopping, Carter's defense team finally had the good fortune to come up before federal Judge Lee Sarokin, the most criminal-friendly judge in the nation. Sarokin ordered a new trial on the grounds that the prosecution should not have been permitted to argue that racial revenge was the motive. "For the state to contend that an accused has the motive to commit murder solely because of his membership in a racial group is an argument which should never be permitted to sway a jury or provide the basis of a conviction." Sarokin wrote. By that...

TORONTO — Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer whose wrongful murder conviction became an international symbol of racial injustice, has died at 76. John Artis, a longtime friend and caregiver, said Carter died in his sleep Sunday. Carter had been stricken with prostate cancer in Toronto, the New Jersey native’s adopted home. Carter spent 19 years in prison for three murders at a tavern in Paterson, N.J., in 1966. He was convicted alongside Artis in 1967 and again in a new trial in 1976. Carter was freed in November 1985 when his convictions were set aside after years of appeals and...

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer who infamously served 19 years in jail after he was wrongly convicted for a triple murder, passed away Sunday in Toronto at the age of 76. Immortalized in a Bob Dylan song and a 1999 feature film, Carter was jailed in 1966 for a fatal shooting at a bar in New Jersey. Although he and his acquaintance John Artis passed a lie detector test and professed their innocence, the all-white jury convicted them. After multiple legal efforts, in 1985 a federal judge ruled that the convictions of Carter and Artis were based "upon an appeal...

DePaul University is rapidly becoming ground zero in the battle to reform academia’s corrupted political culture. For the third time in less than a year the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has publicly rebuked the university for its politically motivated abridgment of free speech, this time for shutting down an anti-affirmative action bake sale and threatening to punish one of the organizers for violation of a newly instituted anti-discrimination policy. The DePaul Conservative Alliance set up a table in the Student Center where they were selling cookies and suggesting differing prices based on race, ethnicity and gender. It...