On December 20, 1973, off-duty police officer Tom Schadler was shot and injured at the Harbor Wig and Record Shop in Benton Harbor, Michigan. In a hotel room a block away, Maurice Carter, was just waking up. The unassuming and soft-spoken Carter was a high school dropout, down-on-his-luck and scouting the neighborhood in an attempt to relocate from the rough streets of his native Gary, Indiana. Local police picked him up as he exited the hotel and asked him to walk past the Harbor Wig and Record Shop’s front window, where Gwen Jones, an employee who had witnessed the shooting, declared that the light-skinned Carter did not resemble the darker-skinned perpetrator in size, shape or color—and he was released.

But the case remained embarrassingly unsolved, and Carter was arrested in 1975 after a friend perjured himself, fingering Carter as the culprit of the 1973 shooting in an attempt to escape drug charges. In spite of a dearth of physical evidence and flimsy testimony, the all-white jury sentenced Carter to life on a charge of “assault with intent to murder a police officer.” For two decades, he languished in prison—until retired broadcast journalist Doug Tjapkes walked into his life in 1992. In Sweet Freedom: Breaking the Bondage of Maurice Carter, Tjapkes recounts the painstaking fight to clear Carter’s name and bring to justice the true culprit, as well as the unlikely friendship that developed between activist and prisoner as their lengthy battle unfolded. “No arrest was made for two years, which was not a good thing in a racially troubled area where a black man had shot and injured a white cop,” says Tjapkes, who was introduced to Carter through Floyd Caldwell, another wrongfully convicted prisoner. “This case needed closure.”

Rachelle Nones