Why the CJ Rice case is all too common — and his exoneration an anomaly

Justice was served this past week, a dozen years too late, when CJ Rice was legally exonerated by the Philadelphia district attorney’s office.

The district attorney’s office dropped all charges against Rice for a 2011 shooting that sent him to prison for a crime he insists he did not — and was physically unable to — commit.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, who covered Rice’s case on CNN and in a cover story in The Atlantic in 2022, has a new documentary airing Sunday on CNN at 8 p.m. ET examining Rice’s 2013 conviction, his ineffective counsel at trial, and the long and winding road it took to free him.

Tapper was alerted to Rice’s case because his pediatrician father, Dr. Theodore Tapper, treated Rice in 2011 five days before the shooting, when Rice could barely walk — much less run, as the shooters were described as having done — because he was recovering from a separate shooting at the time.

Tapper’s 2022 stories documented the many ways Rice’s attorney — an overworked, underpaid, court-appointed lawyer — made critical errors at trial, including failing to subpoena Rice’s cell phone location data, which might have provided an alibi, and allowing prosecutors to put forward to the jury a motive for the shooting that lacked evidence.

It took a high-powered team of attorneys and an exhaustion of the state’s appeals process for Rice’s case to finally get reconsidered by the judicial system last year through a successful federal petition for habeas corpus, a legal principle that allows people who believe they are being held unlawfully in prison to challenge their convictions.

Advocates and lawyers say Rice’s cause was also aided by a district attorney willing to give a decade-old case an honest reexamination and a doctor who happened to have a journalist son and who remained troubled for years by the conviction of a patient he believed was not physically capable of committing the crime he was accused of.

The events that led to the charges against Rice being tossed are a stark reminder that this (relatively) happy ending is very much the exception, not the rule, for those wrongfully convicted of crimes.

A 1990s law and Supreme Court rulings in recent years have raised the bar even higher for successful habeas petitions, in which defendants have to correctly navigate a procedural labyrinth for the opportunity to prove their convictions were flawed.

“It’s too rare,” Karl Schwartz, Rice’s attorney on his habeas petition, said on CNN’s “The Lead” on Monday. “The limitations over the past decade or so that have been put on habeas proceedings and habeas representation makes it even rarer. And that’s really regrettable, especially with what we’ve learned about exculpatory evidence.”