Rubin Carter is in effusive mood.
'I was born in an openly segregated United States of America, 72 years ago, when black people couldn't go to school, couldn't drink at water fountains. And then to have an African-American elected to the White House the slaves built, it was a dream! And the first time I've ever voted was on November 4 ... and it was for Barack Obama.'
Mr Carter, the former American boxer known as the 'Hurricane', could have been champion of the world if he had not been convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a crime he never committed, or so the famous Bob Dylan song goes. In 1964, segregation still existed in the US, and the election of an African-American president was unimaginable.
At the time Mr Carter was a highly ranked middleweight boxer. That year he would fight Joey Giardello for the world middleweight title, losing a 15-round encounter on points. With his shaved head, horseshoe moustache, intimidating stare, and muscular physique, Mr Carter was a menacing presence. And his ability to take a man out with one punch earned him many early-round victories and the nickname Hurricane.
But after his conviction for murder on June 17, 1966, his life was changed forever. He would spend the next 20 years in a prison cell. After a retrial in 1976 in which he was convicted a second time, his case was finally reopened in 1985, thanks to a group of Canadian activists. It was then that federal court Judge Haddon Lee Sarokin ruled that Mr Carter and his friend John Artis had not received a 'fair trial' under the constitution.
Judge Sarokin stated that the prosecution had been 'based on racism rather than reason and concealment rather than disclosure'. Rather than try to prosecute Mr Carter for a third time, 22 years after the fact, prosecutors decided it was not feasible and the case was dropped.