Charges dropped against C.J. Rice after judge deems evidence against him as ‘slender’

After spending more than a decade in prison for a 2011 shooting, C.J. Rice won’t be retried in court after the charges against him were dropped by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office.

Rice was just 17 years old when he was sentenced to 30–60 years for the Point Breeze shooting that hurt four people, including a 6-year-old girl. Now, at the age of 30, Rice’s case was dismissed after a federal judge said his defense attorney was “deficient” and the evidence presented against him in the trial “slender.”

His case captured national attention when CNN anchor and Philadelphia native Jake Tapper published an article in The Atlantic calling Rice’s initial defense “dangerously incompetent.”

Tapper said he was first alerted to Rice’s story by his father, Dr. Theodore S. Tapper, Rice’s pediatrician, who said the then-teenage Rice was medically “incapable” of committing the crime because Rice himself had been a victim of gun violence just weeks earlier. In a televised interview, Dr. Tapper spoke with Rice about receiving letters from him while in prison.

“You get used to constants in jail, but most of them are demeaning or not so personal,” he said. “But a letter with ink on it from somebody on the other side of the wall, that’s personal. That makes you feel human.”

According to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, a key witness didn’t cooperate with authorities during the trial, and the person who identified Rice as the shooter in the case didn’t respond to a request to be re-interviewed. None of the other victims identified Rice as a shooter.

Following his release, Rice told Tapper the “air tastes sweeter” as a free man.

“The sun shine[s] different, it’s a different warmth,” Rice said. “To feel this sudden as a free man, [I] can’t put it into words.”

As of Monday, Krasner’s administration has supported 44 exonerations of 43 wrongfully convicted people.