Philadelphia man incarcerated as a teen is freed after more than a dozen years in prison

C.J. Rice is a free man, and as of Monday morning the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania officially considers him legally innocent of the crime he was convicted of in 2013.

C.J. Rice is a free man, and as of Monday morning the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania officially considers him legally innocent of the crime he was convicted of in 2013. This morning, Judge James Eisenhower, in room 805 in the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia, granted the motion offered by District Attorney Larry Krasner to drop all charges against Rice for a 2011 shooting that sent him to prison for more than a dozen years for a crime he insists he did not and could not have physically committed. Rice’s defense counsel — Karl Schwartz and Amelia Maxfield, who successfully filed the habeas petition to get Rice out of prison and have his conviction overturned — can now pursue having his criminal record expunged of attempted murder charges. “For me personally, I’m glad to see this wrong righted,” Rice told CNN. “Can’t call it a mistake. Because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s judicial system had at least five separate times to correct this specific situation, and chose not to act in the interest of justice. Either the Court did not review the case as the public trust endowed the court the ability to do so, or the Pennsylvania Courts did review the case and chose to allow a clear injustice to stand for as long as no one else knew what was going on. For that, the Pennsylvania Court system is blameworthy and not worthy of any confidence. Nonetheless, my comment to any DA, state, prosecutor, commonwealth who has an innocent person behind bars, let them free!” Rice’s release was more than a dozen years in the making. We told you about his case on CNN and in a cover story in The Atlantic in October 2022, which noted the many ways Rice did not have effective counsel when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sentenced him to prison for 30 to 60 years for the 2011 shooting. I was first alerted to the Rice case by my father, Dr. Theodore S. Tapper, who was Rice’s pediatrician in 2011 and who testified that he did not believe the then-17-year-old Rice was physically capable of carrying out the 2011 shooting, given that he was recovering from a separate shooting at the time and could barely walk, much less run, as the shooters were described as having done.