Freeing David McCallum

In April 2014, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter died after a long battle with cancer. David McCallum was exonerated and freed two months later, after serving twenty-nine years in prison.

This is the story of how Carter and his friend and coauthor Ken Klonsky worked for ten years to help free the wrongfully convicted McCallum, along with a group of committed friends and professionals. It details their struggles from founding an innocence project to take on the case, to finding lawyers willing to work pro bono, to hiring a private detective to sift through old evidence and locate original witnesses, and the most difficult part, convincing members of a deeply flawed criminal justice system to reopen a case that would expose their own mistakes when all they wanted to do was ignore the conflicting evidence. Finally it took a new district attorney, a documentary film, and an op-ed piece written by Carter on his death bed published in the New York Daily News that made a plea for McCallum’s release and turned the tide of justice. Freeing David McCallum tells a tale of frustration, agony, and undying hope, and the miracle that resulted in David’s release.