ABSTRACT
The Hurricane (Bernstein, Jewison, & Ketcham, 1999) is a film biography of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, formerly a championship-caliber boxer and a famous prisoner for many years who has been exonerated through the efforts of many people who believed in his innocence and in the injustice of the legal system’s treatment of him. The movie concerns events that occurred in the recent past. It has been released and well received during a period when the punitive mood of American public opinion that has lasted for 2 decades has been tempered by the discovery that many prisoners condemned to death were actually innocent of the crimes of which they were found guilty. They were victims not only of mistaken outcomes but also of substandard and unjust processes, incompetent defense attorneys, corrupt prosecutors, bellicose juries, and complacent judges. In many cases, the original mistakes have been compounded by long histories of attempts to prevent rehearing and correction of those mistakes. These shocking and shameful developments are exacerbated by the awareness that the injustices were borne disproportionately by racial and ethnic minority group members, a reflection of the common stereotypes of criminality among those groups. Our relief at the final revelations of innocence is mixed with our admiration for the unexpected and very effective help provided by groups of students working with professors in law schools and journalism programs. In turn, our admiration is mixed with our recognition of how easily that help could have failed to occur.
