see it in the faces of the people whose daily life involved pushing defendants into the prison system. Contempt permeated the air.
The exception that proved the rule was one of the Manhattan court’s few black judges, Bruce Wright. Turned down as an undergraduate by Princeton and Notre Dame in 1939 because of his race, he had served in the army in World War II and afterward had become a lawyer and then a judge who wrote books telling it like it was. At bail hearings before most judges, it was a foregone conclusion that most poor and black defendants could not come close to raising the money needed to obtain their freedom. Not so with Judge Wright. He treated every bail hearing with the seriousness it deserved, and often would find drug programs or even jobs so that he could release a defendant rather than have him languish many months in jail without a trial, unless he agreed to a plea bargain to shorten his possible sentence and obtain his release. For his diligence and concern the press anointed Wright with the sobriquet “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce.” That intimidated the other judges into sticking to the high-bail protocol or seeing their prospects for long careers on the bench, let alone promotions, greatly diminished. So when the question of fairness arose in cases involving black defendants, I had a ready ear.
That Harlem Four case was a good example. With Bill Kunstler I also represented two black prisoners who had been awaiting trial in the Brooklyn House of Detention charged with killing an inmate who broke ranks with prisoners who were refusing to go to court on the grounds that they couldn’t get a fair trial. After they were acquitted, Bill asked me to join him on cases all over the country.
“That’s the way you make your name,” he told me. “When the newspaper stories start coming in about you from everywhere, people take notice.”
There was enough work for me in New York, I had told Bill. But the real reason was that I couldn’t bear the prospect of spending months on the road away from Kitty and my children. Not that I would take just any work offered to me in the city: I turned down an attaché case lined with hundred-dollar bills the day Roy Cohn visited our little office on Broadway to see if I would consider a federal criminal case involving mobsters. A big-time lawyer, former counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy, and friend of New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, Cohn was smooth. While I enjoyed the spectacle of him sitting in my straight-backed metal chair trying to hide his disdain for my cramped office that looked out on the tar roof of the local United Auto Workers’ second-floor office right below us, I knew it was the most paltry of Faustian bargains that he was offering.
* * *
Having followed Selwyn Raab’s 1975 coverage of the Carter case in the New York Times, I felt the case’s pull, so I called him. Raab had written that the prosecution’s two key witnesses had recanted their testimony that they had seen Hurricane Carter and John Artis leaving the scene of a 1966 triple murder at a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. Raab didn’t say Carter and Artis were innocent, just that nothing he’d seen or heard established their guilt, and the more he looked into the state prosecutor’s case, the more questions arose.
For instance, the Paterson police said that one 12-gauge shotgun shell and one .32-caliber bullet had been found in the car that Carter had rented and Artis was driving after the triple murder they were accused of committing. The only problem, Raab noted, was that the shotgun shell was older, had a different casing, and contained smaller pellets than the spent shells and pellets found at the crime scene. Also, all the recovered bullet fragments from the .32 were copper coated, but the bullet supposedly found in Carter’s car was unjacketed lead—typical ammunition for police officers’ backup weapons, which were often .32s. In addition there was another murder that same night—it would become central to the prosecutor’s case—committed by a white man named Frank Conforti, who had used a 12-gauge shotgun to kill a black man at the nearby Waltz Inn. Both the weapon and unfired shells had been seized when Conforti was arrested. Those shells matched the one the cops said was found in Carter’s car. The Conforti arresting officer’s report listed two “Westerns,” but there was only