Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was once a middleweight boxing championship contender.  He may have been a murderer.  He may not have been.  He was indisputably a cultural icon.  Rubin "Hurricane" Carter died peacefully Sunday in Toronto. He was 76.
 
Carter's legacy is anything but peaceful.  As an up and coming middleweight in the racially charged sixties, Carter was in trouble with the law as early as age 12.  He spent four years in prisons for various crimes.  That served as the backdrop for the events of June 16, 1966.
 
On that night, three white people were killed by two black men at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Patterson, N.J.  Carter and another man, John Artis, were arrested shortly after the killings.  The two men were convicted of the crimes in 1967 largely on circumstantial evidence supplied by white witnesses with sketchy backgrounds.
 
While in prison in 1974, Carter wrote "The Sixteenth Round."  The autobiography caught the attention of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan who wrote the high powered "Hurricane."  That kind of public advocacy helped lead to a successful appeal for a new trial.  But Carter was convicted for a second time in 1976. 
 
The process finally played out in 1985 when after spending 19 years in prison, Carter's conviction was set aside due to prosecutorial misconduct.  Hurricane owed his freedom in no small measure to the involvement of celebrity activism by the likes of Dylan, Muhammad Ali and others.
 
There were no other convictions for the murders.  No one else was ever charged.  There was no justice for the families of the three victims.
 
This isn't really an isolated case.  High powered attorneys got Buffalo Bills Hall of Fame running back O.J. Simpson acquitted in a famous double murder trial in 1995.  And most recently, Tallahassee police failed to come up with enough evidence to even charge Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Jameis Winston of Florida State with a sexual assault.
 
These cases were all influenced in varying degrees by public pressure and the power of celebrity.  Race dominated the Simpson case.  The influence of a major college football program supported, some would say shielded Winston.
 
Sports, celebrity and the law.  Carter, Simpson and Winston.   Players in an American judicial system that is neither blind nor deaf.