Updated at 3:06 p.m. ET on November 28, 2023
Last Thursday, C. J. Rice celebrated his 30th birthday at State Correctional Institution–Chester, a Pennsylvania prison just southwest of Philadelphia. Rice has been incarcerated since he was 17, when he was charged with a crime he insists he didn’t commit. But because of a decision yesterday in federal court, he may be free by the time he turns 31. Such an outcome is exceedingly rare in cases like Rice’s.
Rice was the subject of The Atlantic’s November 2022 cover story, “This Is Not Justice,” by Jake Tapper, which investigated the circumstances of his conviction and the numerous shortcomings of his court-appointed attorney. Rice was arrested for a September 25, 2011, shooting that left four people injured. No physical evidence tied him to the crime, and the single eyewitness who ultimately identified him as its perpetrator had told police on three previous occasions that she didn’t know who had shot her. She later changed her story.
Compelling physical evidence pointed to Rice’s innocence: On September 3, only three weeks earlier, he had been shot three times in a separate incident. Bullets had ripped through his abdomen and fractured his pelvis; emergency-room doctors had made an incision from his sternum to his navel to extract them. One bullet remains lodged in his pelvis; Rice said last year that he can still feel it sometimes on rainy days.
After the shooting, Rice was bedridden for days. When he visited his pediatrician on September 20, he could barely walk. That doctor was Tapper’s father, Theodore. When Dr. Tapper learned days later that his patient was accused of a crime in which he allegedly ran from the scene, he was shocked. “I don’t think it would have been physically possible,” Tapper’s father told him. “He could not have run away.”
Yet Rice was found guilty on four counts of attempted murder and related charges. In 2013, he was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.
A competent lawyer could have used his injuries and the questionable eyewitness account to undermine the prosecution’s circumstantial case. But Rice’s family was unable to afford private counsel; instead, the court appointed a defense attorney named Sandjai Weaver. Weaver promised to subpoena Rice’s phone records, which he said would prove that he was nowhere near the site of the shooting; no subpoena was ever filed. She promised to send him his discovery files as he awaited trial in jail, unable to afford bail, so that he could use the time to help prepare his case; when she finally did send him something—months after he had already been found guilty—it was a different client’s paperwork.
In court, Weaver failed to sufficiently challenge the sole eyewitness tying her client to the crime and allowed the eyewitness to misstate basic facts about the crime scene’s layout—evidence, Rice believes, that Weaver herself never took the time to visit it.
Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania found that one of Weaver’s errors was so severe that her performance was constitutionally deficient, violating Rice’s “right to counsel” under the Sixth Amendment. Rice’s conviction was overturned, leaving the Philadelphia D.A.’s office six months to decide whether to retry his case. Should the office decline to do so, he will immediately be free to leave prison.
The issue was this: As the trial began, Eric Stryd, the prosecutor, moved to introduce a theory that one of the victims of the September 25 shooting may have been the person who shot Rice on September 3—providing a motive for Rice to retaliate. The trial-court judge, Denis Cohen, questioned whether such a theory could be admissible, because it lacked definitive support—a fact that even the district attorney’s office acknowledged privately at the time. In email correspondence among assistant district attorneys recently made public in Rice’s appeals, Stryd explained that he wanted to claim that the victim and the defendant were members of rival gangs engaged in tit-for-tat shootings, but acknowledged that he didn’t “have any hard evidence of this,” just the claims of anonymous criminal informants.
“If you don’t have specifics about your sources,” another A.D.A. replied, “then it looks like you lack foundation (i.e. it’s all rank hearsay.).”
Weaver objected to the suggestion that her client was a member of a rival gang, but she nevertheless allowed Stryd to introduce his unsubstantiated retaliation theory. Trial transcripts suggest that they had had a brief conversation outside the courtroom the morning that Stryd began presenting his case, and that Weaver had assented to the introduction of the theory, despite the judge’s concerns. Weaver died in 2019; her motivations for this or any other decision she made in Rice’s case are impossible to know.
In December 2022, Karl Schwartz, a Philadelphia defense attorney, filed a writ of habeas corpus on Rice’s behalf, a petition in federal court challenging the legality of his incarceration. (Theodore Tapper helped Rice find Schwartz and may be paying for his services, though Dr. Tapper has not confirmed this.) At the time, other lawyers described Schwartz’s effort as a moonshot. A 2007 study by the legal scholars Joseph L. Hoffmann and Nancy J. King found that of the 2,384 noncapital habeas petitions they sampled, only seven received relief—a success rate just shy of .3 percent.
In Rice’s case, though, the state, with the support of the Philadelphia D.A.’s office, conceded that Rice had been denied effective assistance of counsel by Weaver and agreed that his petition for habeas relief ought to be granted. Stryd’s retaliation theory, the state acknowledged, was “prejudicial,” and Weaver’s decision to allow him to admit it was “objectively unreasonable.” Evidence otherwise tying Rice to the crime “wasn’t strong.” A magistrate judge accepted the state’s concession, and yesterday, District Court Judge Nitza I. Quiñones Alejandro affirmed Rice’s petition, overturning the conviction.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said that the D.A.’s office was “pleased” with the district court’s order vacating Rice’s conviction. His case, they said, will now move to the D.A.’s Sentencing Review Committee, which will solicit the input of homicide prosecutors and the victims of the 2011 shooting, and evaluate whether to proceed with a retrial.
In his original story, Tapper argued that the Sixth Amendment’s “right to counsel” had become an empty guarantee. At the time of Rice’s trial, Philadelphia’s court-appointed attorneys received low flat fees for their work. The meager rates created a perverse incentive to maximize one’s caseload and minimize time spent preparing for trial—as appears to have been the case for Weaver. Despite the turn in Rice’s case, the circumstances that led to his conviction remain the rule, not the exception, including in Philadelphia, which still pays court-appointed lawyers flat fees.
“C. J. has been locked up for 12-plus years for a crime he didn’t commit, because he had a lawyer who was grossly incompetent,” Theodore Tapper told me. “That’s the crime.”
Crystal Cooper, Rice’s mother, celebrated his birthday with a three-hour visit at SCI–Chester on Thursday evening, Thanksgiving. Rice had brownies from a vending machine, the closest thing they could find to a cake. Cooper was shocked to hear the news that his conviction had been overturned. When I reached her this morning, I asked what she’d want to do if her son is released. “I’ve got some chores for him,” she joked. Cooper hopes to plan a big family party and a memorial service for Rice’s father, who died while he was incarcerated. She wants to take a pasta-making class together on Arch Street.
“He can start living his life. He can get his applications in and go to school,” she said. “So much was taken away from him these past 12 years.”
This article originally miscalculated the percentage of successful habeas petitions.