Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, RIP: The triple murderer who fooled Hollywood

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter has died. Sympathetic obituaries say things like “wrongfully convicted” or “exonerated.” But the black middleweight-title-contending boxer was neither.

Carter, in 1966, murdered three people. But Hollywood later made a movie, “The Hurricane,” in which Denzel Washington brilliantly portrayed Carter as a wrongfully convicted near-saint, hounded mercilessly by a determined, racist detective. Excellent moviemaking, but it adds more sludge to the widely held notion of the “racist criminal justice system” that supposedly “warehouses” black males for no reason other than wrong place, wrong time, wrong skin.