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Mr. Artis was 20 when he was arrested and 35 when he was finally released.
While incarcerated in Rahway State Prison (now East Jersey State Prison), he helped rescue four guards who were held hostage during a 1971 prison riot. He was later transferred to a medium security prison where he could enroll in business classes at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in New Jersey.
He later said that his return to prison was more difficult after his second conviction because by then he knew what to expect. He taught himself to play the drums, but also developed Buerger’s disease, an incurable circulatory disease in which several fingers and toes had to be amputated. He was being treated in a Newark hospital when he was paroled in 1981.
In 1987, Mr. Artis pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine, which he allegedly used to relieve the pain of his circulatory disorders. A judge sentenced him to six years in prison, citing Mr. Artis’ murder convictions, even though they had been overturned.
In 1988, after the United States Supreme Court denied an appeal against a lower court decision to overturn the murder convictions, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered the drug judge to order the release of Mr. Artis.
Mr. Artis returned to Virginia, where he advised young inmates at the Norfolk Juvenile Detention Center and later traveled with Mr. Carter promoting victim rights projects and campaigns to have unjustified convictions overturned.
Mr. Artis and his wife Dolly, a social worker, met during his second trial, where she was convinced of his innocence. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1980.
He leaves behind a sister, Deborah Chibar.
No one else was arrested in the triple murder case.
“I don’t know the truth of any historical event,” Rudy Langlais, a producer on The Hurricane, told the Times in 2000. “Rubin Carter and John Artis gave the victims’ families the murders. The truth for Rubin Carter and John Artis is that they were wrongly convicted and there is evidence of that. “
