Yesterday, on April 20, John Artis confirmed that former boxer and outspoken advocate for the wrongly imprisoned Rubin Carter had died. Artis had been taking care of Carter, who had announced in 2012 that he had cancer. Both Artis and Carter had been convicted of murder in 1966 and sentenced to life in prison. Artis was paroled in 1981 after 14 years in prison, and Carter's sentence was overturned in 1985 by a federal judge, whereupon Rubin Carter was released after nearly twenty years in prison.
In the federal judge's decision to overturn the conviction, which can be read online here, the judge cited conflicting evidence in the original trials, changes in important testimony (particularly that of the principal witness for the prosecution, a petty criminal himself, who had identified Carter in the murder trials but later recanted his statements while in prison), records showing that the full results of lie detector tests administered to that principal witness were requested by defense but illegally not given to the defense, evidence that the unfired pistol round introduced as evidence and purportedly found in Carter's car had not been properly logged by investigators and that it in fact had a brass casing unlike the copper casings found at the scene of the murders, and finally the transcripts from the original trials showing that the prosecutor had clearly implied to the jury, over the objections of the defense, that racial animus had motivated the killings when in fact there was no evidence to back up these implications.
As the quotations from Rubin Carter played in this radio report which aired today illustrate, Rubin Carter refused to accept the designation of "prisoner," or wear prison stripes or work a prison job. He stated:
I would not help my keepers to keep me kept. I had only myself to work for; work for my freedom to keep my innocence alive.And later in the same radio broadcast there is another quotation from Rubin Carter in which he states:
It would be very easy to be bitter. I have never done things the easy way. But if I never learned anything in my life, I learned that bitterness only consumes the vessel that contains it. If I was bitter then the prison would have won. And that's the thing that I cannot let happen. I cannot give the prison a victory.In the above video, Rubin Carter can be seen delivering a speech in 1995 arguing that the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of any human being is wrong and that we should resist the voices of those who try to declare that it is just a small problem.
These are statements which are fully in accord with natural universal law. The stealing of the freedom of another human being is a grave violation of natural universal law, and the fact that so many of us go through our lives without even giving it much thought -- in spite of the evidence that it is taking place all around us -- is evidence that we there are powerful forces of hypnosis, misdirection, and mind control which keep us from becoming outraged about these violations, and often from even perceiving that these violations are taking place (I would say that they keep us from "seeing" that these violations are taking place, but in fact we often "see" with our eyes or other senses, without our minds even registering or perceiving what our eyes or other senses are telling us: this is why the term "mind control" is so appropriate).
For more on the connection between natural universal law and mind control, see previous posts such as:
- "Lysander Spooner, natural law, and human consciousness"
- "How to tell if you're under mind control"
- "Blackfish and mind control"
Rest in Peace, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, May 06, 1937 - April 20, 2014.
