True To His Words

The state had tried hard to get Artis to testify against Carter. Officials took Artis to his father's house at Christmastime in 1974 and promised him freedom the next day if he fingered Rubin. He refused. "It would have been a lie," Artis says. "I wasn't brought up like that."

He could not help himself one day in 1973 when he was out on furlough. He was in Paterson, and he had to see the bar where the three people were murdered. He had never been in there. "It was no different than any other bar I'd ever seen," he says. "People kept lookin' at me. I stood inside the door and just looked around. I was trying to place what happened there, from the testimony in the trial...and then I left."

Artis lives in Portsmouth, Va., and works with troubled youths. "Being in prison is like being dead, and I want these kids to know that," he says. "And you know what? When we were cleared, no one even apologized."

Lesra Martin still goes back to Bushwick to visit his siblings and see the old friends who have escaped the usual traps. There are not many left. "I will never forget where I came from," he says. "Ghetto life will always be a part of me. I do not want that feeling to go away." He is further away from it today than ever. After graduating with honors from the University of Toronto, he went to graduate school in sociology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia—a last stop on the Underground Railroad, which spirited slaves out of the South. He was drawn to the black community there. Last year, after getting his master's degree, Lesra entered the law school at Dalhousie. He is interested in constitutional law.

"I enjoy where I am now," Lesra says. "It's frightening that there are still hundreds of thousands of people in the ghettos who can't read or write. I'm no genius. I was just given access and resources. When you're going through what I went through, you don't realize how miraculous it is. But it is miraculous."

And Carter is where he is because Lesra was where he was. The former inmate No. 45472 moved to Canada in 1988, after the state dismissed the charges against him, and for the last four years he has spent much of his time reading, writing and lecturing. He also got married. Lisa Peters is Lisa Carter now.

"I love it up here," says Carter, who intends to remain a U.S. citizen but has applied for landed immigrant status in Canada. He helped Chaiton and Terry Swinton write a book about their shared experience, called Lazarus and the Hurricane, using Lesra's Biblical name. Now, having also written a screenplay based on the book—it has been making the rounds in Hollywood—Carter and the Canadians are doing research on a proposed book about the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby in 1932.

They work out of a six-bedroom half-timbered house on 10 acres of land about 20 miles north of Toronto. They leased the house in a state of disrepair three years ago and converted it into the European hunting lodge that it resembles today. Carter also helped build the two-stall barn behind the house, and in fair weather he likes to spend his leisure riding his horse, Red Cloud, along the trails that wind through the woods and fields for miles around. "I always loved to ride horses, even back in my days as a fighter," Carter says. Horses certainly suit his new lifestyle. Carter has been given the name Badger Star by a medicine man in the Lakota Indian nation, whose culture and traditions Carter regularly studies. He has also been adopted into the family of a local Cree elder, Vern Harper.

Carter has been a willing speaker at colleges and law firms, and he was recently asked to deliver a lecture next fall at Harvard Law School before a student conference on the writ of habeas corpus. Says Judge Sarokin, "I can't think of anybody, with all the opposition now to habeas corpus, who better symbolizes the need for it than Hurricane Carter."

The Great Writ, as legal scholars call it, has been coming under heightened attack from the political right, and civil libertarians view it today as a kind of endangered species, particularly given the ultraconservative cast of the U.S. Supreme Court. Leslie Harris, chief legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., says that the Bush Administration has made elimination of habeas corpus the centerpiece of its efforts to look tough on crime. The writ is the only instrument by which the federal judiciary can correct abuses of the Bill of Rights at the state-court level, according to Harris, and the Carter-Artis case shows how vital an instrument it can be.