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Fred Hogan was serving an Army hitch in Europe when he read about the 1966 murder conviction of Rubin Carter, once the third-ranked middleweight boxer in the U.S. Hogan had known "Hurricane" Carter slightly, and to him the prosecution story just did not seem to add up, even though around Paterson, N.J., where Carter lived, he was known as a trouble-prone black militant. The case gnawed at Hogan until 1970 when he became an investigator in the Monmouth county public defender's office and was finally allowed to visit Carter in prison. Convinced that the boxer was innocent, Hogan could not interest his office in helping. So he began looking into the case on his own time.
In June 1966 two black men armed with a shotgun and pistol shot up a white working-class bar in Paterson, killing the bartender and two of three customers. Fears of racial violence that summer were high, a $10,500 reward was posted, and the mayor pledged three months' vacation to the cop who solved the case. Four months later, police charged Rubin Carter and his friend John Artis, who had been seen driving their car in the vicinity of the shooting minutes afterward. Though the surviving bar customer insisted that Carter and Artis were not guilty, the two were convicted—largely on the "eyewitness" testimony of two whites—petty criminals who had been burglarizing a nearby office and claimed to have seen the fleeing gunmen.
Hogan was not able to get very far toward breaking the jury's verdict until he and Film Writer Richard Solomon, who was also interested in the case, enlisted the aid of Selwyn Raab, a seasoned investigative reporter then working for a local public-TV station (later for the New York Times). In 1974 Hogan got one of the burglars to admit that he had not witnessed the murder; under Raab's questioning, the other independently admitted that the two gunmen he had seen were not Carter and Artis.
But the original trial judge turned down a bid for a retrial, saying that the recantations "lacked the ring of truth." With an appeal now before the New Jersey Supreme Court, a campaign of publicity and pressure (masterminded by New York Adman George Lois) has been aimed at getting Governor Brendan Byrne to look into the case and at least release Carter and Artis from prison until the state supreme court acts. Two weeks ago, the campaign culminated in a Manhattan fund-raising concert headlined by Bob Dylan, who has written a protest song about Carter. Meanwhile, Governor Byrne has ordered and received his own investigative report. He is expected to announce his decision this week.
THE UNSAVORY BIKERS
More than a year ago, recalls an editor of the Detroit News, "this girl wrote us about her old man and some others being convicted of murder. Naive guy that I am, I thought she meant her father." The editor might have done nothing about the letter if he had realized the girl was talking about a man she used to live with—one of four bearded, cocky, foul-mouthed motorcyclists sentenced to the gas chamber in New Mexico for the mutilation slaying of an Albuquerque man in February 1974. Still, some of the condemned cyclists were from Michigan, and the News decided to send a reporter to cover the story. Last week—some 100 stories later—the paper proudly bannered the news that the four had been freed.