Depicting Injustice

In The Atlantic’s November-issue cover story, “This Is Not Justice,” Jake Tapper writes about C. J. Rice, who, as a teenager, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to decades in prison. Rice’s court-appointed lawyer made a series of missteps before and during his trial that, Tapper shows, severely hampered his defense. Rice’s story reveals the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment, which theoretically guarantees the right to counsel. In practice, Rice’s experience is a common one.

For the cover, we commissioned the artist Fulton Leroy Washington, known as MR WASH, to paint a portrait of Rice. Washington recognized much of his own story in Rice’s—he spent 21 years in prison for nonviolent drug convictions before having his sentence commuted in 2016 by President Barack Obama.

After receiving a life sentence without parole, in 1997, Washington began experimenting with oil paints in prison. He soon developed : photorealistic subjects crying large tears, with smaller portraits of figures from his subjects’ lives inside the teardrops. He continued to elaborate on this motif and others over the—which he believes . The painting, which depicts Obama signing Washington’s clemency papers, reimagines Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s . Two years later, life imitated art, and Washington was freed.