Philadelphia DA Drops All Charges Against Man CNN’s Jake Tapper Helped Free From Prison

Screenshot via CNN.

“The air tastes sweeter.”

That was C.J. Rice’s comment to Jake Tapper as the two sat down Monday morning to discuss the long road it took to free him from prison — a journey that’s intertwined with the CNN anchor’s own family.

Tapper’s father, Dr. Theodore Tapper, is a pediatrician and had taken care of Rice since he was a baby. In 2011, when Rice was 17 years old, he was shot multiple times while riding his bicycle. His grievous injuries included an incision down the length of his torso that required more than two dozen staples to close, a fractured pelvis, ongoing infection issues, and bullet fragments that surgeons were unable to remove. Rice went to see Dr. Tapper for follow-up treatment following his release from the hospital, and as Tapper wrote in a detailed profile of Rice for The Atlantic in October 2022, the teenager was “in severe pain and could barely walk,” “needed help to get dressed in the morning and help to go up and down stairs,” and walked “bent over and with short, choppy steps, like an old man.”

Rice would end up being accused of being involved in a shooting on September 25, 2011 — only six days after that doctor visit — that left four people wounded. The alleged perpetrator was described by one of the victims as running away from the scene of the crime — an impossible act for Rice.

As Dr. Tapper described Rice’s condition at the time of the September 25 shooting, “I don’t think it would have been physically possible” for him to have been the gunman. “He could not have run away.”

Tragically for Rice, his court-appointed attorney failed to ever request Rice’s medical records showing how his wounds were still far from healed when the September 25 shooting occurred, along with other strategic errors that seem stunning in retrospect, such as failing to obtain pre-trial statements from multiple alibi witnesses for Rice, failing to request the cell phone data that would have confirmed Rice’s location on the other side of town away from the scene of the crime, and not objecting to a prejudicial argument presented by prosecutors that would have normally been excluded.

A criminal defense attorney armed with this sort of exculpatory evidence might have been able to get the charges dropped before trial; at minimum, it seems shocking that Rice’s lawyer failed to aggressively pursue these multiple strong defenses at trial.

Rice was convicted by the jury and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison. Dr. Tapper stayed in touch with his patient during his years of imprisonment, writing letter after letter on his behalf, supporting him throughout the frustrating denial of multiple appeals, and then eventually got his journalist son involved after the appeals process seemed to be exhausted.

When I interviewed Jake Tapper in December, the CNN anchor shared how he had first posted Rice’s plight in a Twitter thread that got a lot of attention, but he later deleted because he “got a couple of the facts wrong.” He then pitched the story to several media outlets, ultimately writing the article for The Atlantic, published after two years of research and interviews, which went viral and brought a massive national spotlight to the story.

Rice had another critically important ally during these past few years: Karl Schwartz, an experienced defense attorney whose legal bills Tapper told me he was “100% sure” that his father was paying.

“My dad is a big believer of giving charity anonymously,” said Tapper, “so he will not acknowledge that he is paying” Schwartz’s legal bill. (Judaism, like many faith traditions, places a special value on anonymous charity.)

Last December, Rice finally got a chance at the justice he was denied at his trial, when a federal court in Pennsylvania granted a writ of habeas corpus (a legal motion in which a prisoner argues they are being wrongfully held) to Rice finding that his “trial counsel rendered ineffective assistance” to a degree that violated his constitutional rights.

The ruling essentially unwound the trial and conviction, giving prosecutors a 180-day deadline to decide to either allow Rice to go free or to hold a new trial.

That deadline was approaching in May, but Rice will not have to wait that long for freedom. Monday, a judge granted the motion filed by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner to drop the charges against Rice, officially ending the case for good.

“CJ Rice is a FREE MAN and has been exonerated!” Tapper posted in celebration.

Mediaite reached out to Tapper for his reaction to Rice’s release. “It is so rare that a criminal justice story ends with actual justice,” said Tapper. “This has been one of the most powerful journalistic experiences of my life. I am immensely proud of CJ and my dad, grateful for CJ’s attorneys and justice-minded prosecutors in the DA’s office, and shocked at the shoddiness of the system that locked CJ up for 12 years.”

The CNN anchor was in Philadelphia for the hearing that would ultimately set Rice free, and shared with CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta a clip of his interview with Rice for a documentary that will air on Sunday during The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.

In the clip, Tapper asks Rice, who is now 30 years old, how it felt to be out after almost 13 years in prison.

“It feels amazing,” said Rice as he broke out into a broad smile. “The air tastes sweeter. The sun shines different. It’s a different warmth.”

According to an article Tapper published on CNN.com, the next step for Rice’s attorneys will be to seek having his criminal record expunged of the attempted murder charges. Tapper also wrote a follow-up piece for The Atlantic sharing some of the details of Rice’s release from prison in December after the court granted his habeas petition and the past few months waiting for his exoneration.

Tapper has partnered with nonprofit organization Dream.org to set up a GoFundMe for Rice to “[h]elp an innocent man rebuild his life after being unjustly imprisoned of 12 years.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.

This article has been updated with additional information and to clarify the date of Rice’s release.