Hurricane Carter’s dying wish is about to come true.
A Brooklyn man who’s been imprisoned 29 years for murder is set to have his conviction thrown out Wednesday following years of lobbying by the famed former boxer, the Daily News has learned.
“My single regret in life is that David McCallum … is still in prison,” Rubin (Hurricane) Carter wrote in a Daily News op-ed two months before he died in April, calling for Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson to review the case.
“Knowing what I do, I am certain that when the facts are brought to light, Thompson will recommend his immediate release,” Carter wrote.
That’s exactly what’s expected to happen when McCallum, 45, appears in front of Administrative Justice Matthew D’Emic Wednesday, several sources said.
His pro bono lawyers, Oscar Michelen and John O’Hara, and a DA spokeswoman all declined to comment Tuesday.
Carter, who was wrongfully convicted and locked up for 19 years for a triple murder in New Jersey, became involved with innocence advocacy after getting freed.
“He’d be overwhelmed and ecstatic by the fact that David is being released after all these years,” said John Artis, who was convicted and later exonerated alongside the one-time middleweight world title contender who inspired Bob Dylan’s classic “Hurricane” and a Denzel Washington film.
McCallum was convicted with pal Willie Stuckey for the kidnapping and murder of Nathan Blenner, 20, who was found in a Bushwick park with a gunshot to his head in October 1985.
Both suspects — who were 16 at the time — gave brief and contradictory confessions, each pinning the homicide on the other. They were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Stuckey died behind bars in 2001. He will also be cleared posthumously — the ninth and tenth exonerations by the Brooklyn DA this year.
“I was beaten by the officers and I was coerced into making a confession,” McCallum told a parole board in 2012, records show.
His appeals exhausted, lawyers approached the DA’s Conviction Review Unit with evidence of another suspect who was questioned without the defense getting notified and of DNA from a car used in the abduction, which matched other men.
Thompson told The Associated Press Tuesday night that the confessions were false, “in large part because these 16-year-olds were fed false facts.” He said no other evidence tied the two to the abduction or killing.
The McCallum case was also the subject of the documentary “David & Me” by filmmaker Ray Klonsky, which had its debut in June.
Win Wahrer, who, along with Carter, founded the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted in Toronto about a decade ago, said the late advocate would have wanted to be present in court for McCallum.
“He would have probably been one of the first people to be there and shake his hand and give him a hug,” she said.
She believes Carter’s open letter in The News, as well as the documentary, helped nudge prosecutors towards making their decision.
“A momentum was building around the case,” Wahrer said. “It was in the public eye. You couldn’t ignore it.”
