This Is Not Justice

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On Tuesday, September 20, 2011, a young patient walked haltingly into a medical office in South Philadelphia to have his bullet wounds examined.

The patient was a 17-year-old named C. J. Rice, who lived in the neighborhood. The doctor was a pediatrician named Theodore Tapper.

My father had been working as a physician in South Philadelphia for more than four decades and had known Rice since he was a child. Rice had been brought in for a checkup soon after he was born, and as a doctor my father had seen Rice several times a year, along with other members of the family. Two weeks and three days before his September appointment, Rice had been shot while riding his bike, in what he believed was a case of mistaken identity. To remove one of the bullets, a surgeon had made a long incision down the middle of Rice’s torso. The wound was then closed with a ridge of staples—more than two dozen. After his discharge, Rice was in severe pain and could barely walk. He needed help to get dressed in the morning and help to go up and down stairs.

When Rice arrived at my father’s office, the wound was still stapled together. Rice slowly lifted himself onto the examination table and winced as he laid himself down. When the exam was over, he slowly pushed himself back up. My father recalls Rice walking out of the office bent over and with short, choppy steps, like an old man.

The timing of that visit is significant because, six days later, the Philadelphia police announced that they were seeking Rice and a friend of his, Tyler Linder, in connection with a shooting that had occurred in South Philadelphia on the evening of September 25 and left four people wounded, including a 6-year-old girl. No guns were recovered and no physical evidence linked anyone to the crime. On the night of the shooting, the victims told the police they had no idea who was responsible. Then, the next day, one of the victims said she had seen Rice sprinting away.

Rice was still recuperating. Thinking the matter would be cleared up quickly, he turned himself in.

I first met C. J. Rice, by Zoom, in February 2022. But I felt I had gotten to know him over the preceding few years through his letters from prison to my father.

Whatever Rice’s expectations, the matter had not been cleared up quickly. To represent him, the court had appointed a lawyer whose attention was elsewhere and whose performance would prove dangerously incompetent. Despite the weakness of the case, Rice was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison. Eventually, seeking evidence for an appeal, Rice wrote to my father and asked for help obtaining his hospital records—documents that Rice’s original lawyer appears never to have sought, but which could have underscored his physical condition at the time. My father obtained the records, and the two men kept writing to each other. The correspondence has become important to both of them.

[Read: C. J. Rice’s Narrow Path to Freedom]

Writing helps Rice pass the time at the State Correctional Institution–Coal Township, the Pennsylvania prison where he is incarcerated. In an angular hand on notebook paper, he reflects on the gravitational pull of what he calls “19148”: the zip code of his old neighborhood in South Philadelphia.

In one letter, he described his childhood:

At the age of 7 you make your first drug sale, oblivious to what you’re actually doing, you’re just following directions to count 13 bags and once you get the money, count out $110 (receiving $10 for yourself). So, imagine that this is all you see, and having it all around you endlessly, could you understand or begin to think that it’s wrong? How can you, when it seems everyone’s doing it in some form or fashion. It seems normal. It is normal. This is how life is lived. This is how money is made. That’s what you think.

In another letter, he imagined a playground scene in which he and his contemporaries were all 7 years old, then went on to describe what happened to that cohort year by year. Violence and crime were rife in 19148, and few were untouched by it. Rice concluded with a summary:

Mir, Sha, NaNa, DaDa, Quan, Keem, Trey, Bird, Heads, Wooka, Jamil, Weeb, Fee, Ovie, E-Man, Veronica, Ern, Mango, Johnny T, Ant, Jeff, Big J, Tez, A.J., Cheese, Zy, Quan (different Quan)—That’s the names that I can think of now (they’re all dead), out of the 27 of them, maybe only 4 of them were older than 25 years old. Maybe another 80 (including myself) who were all struck by gunfire but survived, (all before 21 years old) (some before 18 years old.)

Rice’s father was addicted to heroin and was in and out of prison. By the time Rice was a teenager, he himself was selling heroin and smoking marijuana. Rice was arrested for marijuana possession in 2009, at age 15, and then again in 2010. After one of these encounters with the law, his mother sent Rice to live with his aunt in North Philadelphia for a period of time to get him out of the neighborhood. Despite the chaos around him, Rice did well in school. He had always been bright—in kindergarten, he was reading well above grade level—and by September 2011, at the start of his senior year, he needed only a handful of credits to graduate from high school. He had visited Howard University and sat in on classes at Temple. He thought he might want to become an accountant.

[Read: An interview with Fulton Leroy Washington about the November issue cover art]

My father, who is now 82, came of age during the 1960s and has always been something of an activist. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he chose to do his pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and returned there after a period with the public-health service in New York City. He became involved