PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — CNN journalist Jake Tapper is drawing national attention to a Philadelphia story — the case of C.J. Rice — to demonstrate the need for better pay for court-appointed lawyers.
Rice, 30, is now a free man after spending more than 12 years behind bars. He had been convicted of four counts of attempted murder, and the District Attorney's Office dropped all charges against him last Monday because of lack of evidence and incompetent counsel.
"The attorney he had was not good, and I'm sure the judge saw that and I'm sure other people saw that," Tapper said.
"He was pleading with his mom to have his attorney, his incompetent defense attorney, to have her get the phone records that would show that I was in West Philadelphia, not South Philly where the crime occurred on South 18th.”
Tapper, who has ties to Philadelphia, has been investigating Rice’s attempted murder case for about three years. He first heard of the case from his father, Dr. Theodore Tapper, a South Philadelphia pediatrician.
"He started telling me about this young man who was in prison for a crime that my dad was convinced he could not have committed," CNN’s Tapper said.
The doctor had seen C.J. in 2011, after C.J. had been shot several times. He had a shattered pelvis from one of the bullets, and the doctor says Rice had a hard time walking.
Five days later, there was a shooting in South Philly. Four people were wounded. Witnesses said the shooter ran from the scene. Dr. Tapper says if the shooter had been C.J., he would not have been able to run, owing to his physical condition.
But Rice was convicted for the shootings and sentenced to 30-60 years.
In a 2022 cover story for the Atlantic Magazine, Tapper argued Rice's court-appointed attorney gave a thoroughly incompetent defense, which Tapper partly chalked up to an overwhelming caseload.
"As long as Pennsylvania and other states and commonwealths pay court-appointed attorneys peanuts, we are going to have results like this."
After Dr. Tapper paid for a private attorney, and the case got national attention, Rice was able to successfully get the charges dropped, leading to his release.
“There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of people like C.J., who are just poor, wrong place wrong time, in a system that is not dedicated sufficiently to justice that they are less fortunate,” said CNN’s Tapper.
"The bigger message is, as long as we have a criminal justice system that is focused on winning, getting arrests, getting convictions — not necessarily on justice, finding the right person — we're going to have a lot more C.J. Rices.”
He says, court-appointed attorneys need to be paid more so everyone gets a fair trial — not just those who can afford it.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story did not distinguish correctly between court-appointed attorneys and public defenders. Court-appointed attorneys are private lawyers, paid by the hour by the state or federal government; public defenders are salaried employees of county, state or federal government.