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Racial Horror. Trying to poke holes in the state's case, defense attorneys argued that the police were so anxious to get a conviction that they played fast and loose with the facts linking Carter and Artis to the killings. The lawyers went so far as to present evidence suggesting that the cops could have planted the bullet and shotgun shell in the Dodge. The witnesses who undercut Carter's alibi, they charged, had been linked to the police. But the defense was badly wounded by one prosecution coup: the judge allowed the state to argue that Carter and Artis had killed the three whites in order to avenge the murder six hours earlier of a black tavern owner whose stepson was a friend of Carter's.
In his summation. Carter's lawyer, Myron Beldock, countered that such a tactic was a "racial horror that feeds on the basest, most dirty part of all of us." He asked the jury to reject the prosecution's theory of Carter as a "mad, racist killer" bent on revenge. Instead, the jury rejected Beldock's case, and Hurricane Carter and John Artis were led back to jail to await sentencing and the start of a new round of appeals.