A Philadelphia man will not be retried for a new trial in a 2011 shooting that injured four people, including a 6-year-old girl, and sent a 17-year-old to prison for more than a decade, prosecutors announced Monday.
The case against C.J. Rice, now 30, has been closed by a federal judge, months after a federal judge ruled his defense was flawed and the evidence “weak” in his 2013 trial. Rice was serving a 30- to 60-year prison sentence before being released following a federal court ruling late last year.
The case was formally dismissed Monday after District Attorney Larry Krasner decided not to retry the case. He said most of the 45 acquittals his office has defended were more obvious cases of acquittal, but a new analysis of the evidence in Rice’s case reveals more nuances. He said it was found to be included.
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“This case falls within the 15% or so (of exoneration cases) that we consider to be opaque,” Krasner said at a press conference, joined by defense attorneys who pushed back on that view.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner speaks with members of the media during a press conference on October 13, 2022 in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
The turnaround hinged on several key points. A surgeon testified that Mr. Rice could not have been the person who fled the scene because Mr. Rice had sustained severe injuries from the shooting three weeks earlier, which fractured his pelvis.
Rice was shot to death on September 3, 2011, in what he said was a case of mistaken identity. His now-deceased trial lawyer stipulated that one of the victims of the September 25, 2011 mass shooting was a potential suspect in the Rice shooting, despite little evidence. agreed and motivated prosecutors.
“The evidence of (his) guilt is scant. Only one of the four victims was able to confirm his identity and admitted that the last time he saw (him) was at least four years before the shooting.” was not recovered,” U.S. Judge Carol Sandra Moore Wells said in an October report.
Rice, who was released from prison in December, did not attend Monday’s court hearing. His lawyers said at a news conference that the case reflects many wrongful convictions, including misidentified witnesses, incompetent lawyers and prosecutorial overreach.
Nilam Sanghvi, legal director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, said the crime should have been thoroughly investigated before the trial, not years later.
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“It takes courage to confront the wrongs of the past,” she said, while also saying, “We can never actually right them, because the years lost to wrongful convictions, here… “There’s no way we can get back more than 10 years of CJ’s life.”
