Framed at 17 for attempted murder, Rice asks a federal jury to award damages for a promising future stolen by Philly P.
PHILADELPHIA – Today, attorneys for Charles “C.J.” Rice, 30, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Philadelphia, and at least seven employees of the Philadelphia Police Department, seeking damages and relief for Mr. Rice’s wrongful arrest and the more than 12 years he spent in prison.
According to the lawsuit, Mr. Rice, who grew up in South Philadelphia, was a bright 17-year-old honor student in 2011, looking forward to going to college or perhaps serving his country in the military. Instead, Mr. Rice spent his late teens and all of his 20s in prison, after Philadelphia detectives manufactured faulty identifications, fabricated a baseless motive, and withheld exculpatory evidence in order to frame Mr. Rice for attempted murder.
On September 3, 2011, Mr. Rice was 17 years old, and riding bikes with his friend Tyler Linder in their South Philadelphia neighborhood, when both boys were shot at by an unknown assailant in a passing car. Mr. Linder was unhurt, but Mr. Rice was struck three times, including with one bullet that fractured his pelvis. That crime was never solved.
Three weeks later, on September 25, unknown gunmen fired at the family of a woman named Latrice Johnson as they sat on the porch of their home on S. 18th Street. The family’s statements to police that night said they were unable to identify the shooters, who ran away from the scene.
There is no evidence in police records that the two shootings were related, but—according to today’s complaint—Philadelphia detectives decided to link them anyway. Detectives targeted Rice and Linder as the Sept. 25 shooters, inventing a narrative in which the Sept. 25 shooting was retaliation for the prior shooting of Mr. Rice.
Mr. Rice and Mr. Linder both had strong alibis for the night of Sept. 25. Mr. Linder was 10 miles away, assisting his mother with a cleaning job, as shown in surveillance footage from the time of the shooting. Mr. Rice was in West Philadelphia, at his godmother’s house, surrounded by her family, recuperating from his surgery and a subsequent bout of pneumonia.
Most importantly, Mr. Rice’s recent injuries had left him barely able to walk, let alone to run from the scene of Latrice Johnson’s house as the witnesses all agreed the assailants had done. Mr. Rice’s lifelong doctor, Dr. Theodore Tapper, would later testify under oath that he did not believe Mr. Rice was physically capable of committing this crime.
The detectives knew of Mr. Rice’s physical condition: they had interviewed him, in relation to his own shooting, days before. They also knew that—though the Johnson family knew Rice—none of the witnesses had identified him as one of the shooters on the night of the crime.
Nevertheless, the lawsuit contends, Philadelphia detectives set out to manufacture a case against Mr. Rice and Mr. Linder. Using highly questionable and manipulative methods, detectives maneuvered Latrice Johnson and her stepdaughter into identifying Mr. Rice and Mr. Linder from photo arrays. Both men were arrested after they voluntarily appeared to assist police with their inquiries, and both were charged with attempted murder.
At the trial, in 2013, Mr. Linder was acquitted, but Mr. Rice—based entirely on the false identification and the manufactured supposed motive—was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.
“It’s heartbreaking, to just have your child snatched away from you,” Mr. Rice’s mother, Crystal Cooper, said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Rice never stopped insisting on his innocence, and never stopped advocating for his own exoneration. He was denied relief multiple times in Pennsylvania courts, but never gave up.
“Optimism plus resilience plus persistence: that’s the way I look at things,” Mr. Rice wrote in a 2018 letter to Dr. Tapper, more than seven years into his wrongful imprisonment. “It’s only for so long that the true facts, the truth, can be suppressed.”
CJ’s plight to prove his innocence was the subject of an October 2022 feature in The Atlantic authored by Dr. Tapper’s son CNN Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper.
Finally, in December 2022, with the support of the Tappers, attorneys Karl Schwartz of Wiseman & Schwartz, Amelia Maxfield of the Exoneration Project, Nilam Sanghvi of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, and Donald Verrilli Jr. and Ginger Anders of Munger, Tolles and Olson LLP, Mr. Rice filed a new habeas petition seeking his release. In responding to the petition, the Commonwealth conceded the case was weak and rested “almost entirely on one problematic eyewitness identification.” There was also, the Commonwealth admitted, “no concrete evidence” for the supposed motive.
In November 2023, the court vacated Mr. Rice’s conviction. In March 2024 following a thorough re-investigation of the case, the Commonwealth declined to retry the case, and dismissed all charges. Mr. Rice was free.
“Being at liberty is something words cannot truly express,” says Mr. Rice. “Now I’m just looking forward to joy, and only looking back to learn.”
Today’s lawsuit asks a jury to rule on and provide damages for multiple violations of Rice’s constitutional rights, including violation of due process, malicious prosecution, unlawful detention, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and conspiracy.
The suit names as defendants Philadelphia Police Department employees John Craig, Neal Aitken, Robert Spadaccini, Francis Kelly, Anthony Vega, John Landis, and James Cook, as well as the City of Philadelphia and unknown individuals who contributed to the conspiracy.
Mr. Rice is represented by attorneys Jon Loevy, Gayle Horn, and Renee Spence of the civil rights law firm Loevy + Loevy, as well as Philadelphia attorney Andrew D. Montroy. Just last week, Loevy + Loevy helped secure a record $50 million verdict for a similarly exonerated Chicago man named Marcel Brown.
“No one can give Mr. Rice back the years he lost, and nothing can repay him for the physical and emotional distress he has been through,” says attorney Gayle Horn of Loevy + Loevy. “But police misconduct has run rampant in Philadelphia for far too long, and the City must be held responsible for the illegal and unethical actions of its officers.”
As the lawsuit argues, the Philadelphia Police Department has a decades-spanning history of manufacturing cases, which has gone unchecked and uncorrected. Since December 2016, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office reports there have been at least 49 exonerations, demonstrating the pervasive patterns, practices, and culture of police misconduct.
“It was about frankly not caring too much about whether the defendant was actually guilty,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said of his city’s justice system, in a March 2024 CNN interview with Jake Tapper. “It is a system that without question disproportionately picks on poor people, and picks on black people, and picks on brown people. That’s what it does, that’s what it’s always done.”
During his long incarceration, Mr. Rice completed his high-school education, and became a tutor in prison helping other incarcerated men get their G.E.D.s. Since his release, Mr. Rice has completed Georgetown University’s intensive Paralegal Studies Program.
After surviving, enduring, and triumphing over his own wrongful conviction, it is Mr. Rice’s plan to study the law.
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A copy of the complaint can be found here.
Loevy + Loevy is one of the nation’s largest civil rights law firms, and over the past decade has won more multi-million-dollar jury verdicts than any other civil rights law firm in the country.
For media inquiries, contact Michael McDunnah, Director of Communications, at 312.371.5871, or mcdunnah@loevy.com.
