John Artis, a co-defendant who was wrongly convicted of triple murder with Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, died on Nov. 7 at his home in Hampton, Va. He was 75.

His friend Fred Hogan, who helped to overturn the convictions, said Artis suffered a gastric aneurysm, according to the Associated Press.

Before their convictions for a 1966 triple slaying were overturned, the case attracted international attention and became an indictment against racism in the criminal justice system.

Carter, however, received most of the attention. Folk singer Bob Dylan shined a spotlight on the injustice of the case through a 1975 song “Hurricane,” and Denzel Washington portrayed Carter in the 1999 film The Hurricane.

In 1988, Artis told The New York Times, “I was always the guy in the background, the other guy in the case that no one knew or cared about.”

Paterson, N.J. police officers pulled over Carter’s white Dodge because it supposedly fit the description of the getaway car used earlier that night by suspects who murdered two men and a woman at a local bar.

At the time in 1966, Artis was 20, and Carter was a 29-year-old ranking middleweight boxer. The suspects were Black and the victims were white.

According to the Times, Artis and Carter passed lie detector tests. Nevertheless, an all-white jury convicted them based on the testimony of two criminals. They were sentenced to three life terms each.

The two men appealed their convictions. As they fought in court to clear their names, Carter emerged as a civil rights activist from behind bars.

Artis earned parole in 1981. Four years later, U.S District Judge H. Lee Sarokin threw out the convictions, condemning the prosecutor for “fatally infecting the trial” by injecting a racial revenge motive for the murders and withholding evidence.

Although Carter received the attention, Hogan said the former boxer often called Artis his “hero,” according to the AP. Behind the scenes, Artis declined the prosecutor’s offer of a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying that Carter had killed the victims.

The two men remained lifelong friends. Carter died in 2014 after losing his battle with prostate cancer.

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Hogan said, “John was promised a lot of things that would have helped himself avoid prison if he would say that Rubin was involved in the crime. John said, ‘I’m not lying. We didn’t do it, we weren’t there, and I’m not going to get involved in any of that.’”

After his exoneration, Artis counseled inmates at the Norfolk Juvenile Detention Center. He also assisted lawyers working on delivering justice in wrongful conviction cases in the United States and Canada.