Charles “CJ” Rice was just 17 years old when he was convicted of a crime he did not commit.

CJ Rice Exonerated

Now 30 year old Rice is using the injustice of the last 13 years to galvanize the life he almost spent behind bars after being exonerated and declared legally innocent of the crime he was convicted of in 2013 on March 18, 2024.

According to the GoFundMe, CJ wants to “embrace this opportunity” and become a paralegal.

With the help of Dream.org, the GoFundMe aims to help CJ start a new life with everything from a place to stay to clothes to wear as he builds a new future.

The CJ Rice case

CJ Rice, formally known Charles J. Rice, was convicted in a September 2011 shooting for attempted murder and sentenced to 30-60 years behind bars in 2013.

According to the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, the South Philadelphia shooting left a woman identified as Latrice Johnson, a 6-year-old girl and two others injured.

Johnson called 911 after the shooting and described the suspects as two men running away in hoodies and black sweatpants but couldn’t fully identify them.

Through an initial investigation with victims in the hospital, Rice’s co-defendant, Tyler Linder, was identified as one of the shooters. Detectives interviewed Johnson while she was in the hospital and she identified 17-year-old Rice as one of the shooters running away although she hadn’t seen the teen in a few years. Rice had been friends with Johnson’s son when he was younger, according to the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

In her description, Johnson said Rice was wearing a hoodie and claimed that she was able to see his full face and long braids poking out the side of the hood. However, Rice’s arrest photo depicted him with shorter cornrows flushed against his head. Despite this, a case against Rice and Linder was built.

According to the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, among the evidence was a theory that the shooting was retaliatory, which wasn’t proven. That’s because Rice was shot and injured a few days prior. It’s alleged the suspects ran from the scene, and Rice’s counsel never used his medical records as evidence to help Rice’s case.

Rice’s case received national attention after CNN anchor Jake Tapper began reporting on it. His father, Dr. Theodore Tapper, is Rice’s former doctor and treated his injuries.

Although it was alleged that the shooters ran from the 2011 crime scene, this is something that Dr. Tapper believed Rice just physically couldn’t do at the time.

Officials believed the 2011 shooting involved gang affiliations, leading the DA’s Gun Violence Task Force to begin their investigation to see whether or not Rice could be re-tried for the shooting or to dismiss the charges in full.

This suggestion of motive and the sole faulty eyewitness identification of CJ led to his conviction on four counts for attempted murder.

A free man

Rice’s defense counsel filed a habeas petition to get CJ out of prison and have his conviction overturned.

On March 18, 2024, the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas granted the Commonwealth’s motion to dismiss all charges against Rice, officially making CJ a free man.

Read C.J. Rice’s story

This past weekend, the Tennessee A&I men’s basketball team, an HBCU squad that won a title more than 60 years ago, got a White House visit.

Tennessee A&I made history

The living members of the Tennessee A&I Tigers basketball team were honored by Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House.

“This is the greatest day of my life,” said George Finley, a player on the Tigers team, said to CBS News.

Credit : Tennessee State University

The Tennessee A&I Tigers men’s basketball team was the first HBCU team to win a national championship in 1957, and made history again by becoming the first college team to win three back-to-back national titles from 1957-1959.

“I thought this would never take place,” said Finley, who was part of the 1959 championship team, told the network. “[Winning] the championship was big, but it wasn’t as big as being here with [Vice President] Harris today.”

The challenges

In a time of segregation and the Jim Crow era, Black teams were often not recognized for their achievements but the team finally got their just due.

Harris hosted six members of the team in a meeting along with their family, friends, and those close to the group of former athletes. Henry Carlton, Robert Clark, Ron Hamilton, Ernie Jones, George Finley, and Dick Barnett joined Finley in the Roosevelt Room at the White House.

Tennessee A&I is now known as Tennessee State University.

A Detroit man who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for over six years was awarded $10 million in damages by a jury.

$10 million for man wrongfully convicted

Alexandre Ansari was wrongfully serving a life sentence over claims that in 2012 he shot and killed Ileana Cuevas, a 15-year-old girl, and wounded two others in Detroit, according to a lawsuit filed by Ansari in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division.

Alexandre Ansari (Photo Source: Wolf Mueller Law)

“Once I got the verdict back, my heart dropped. And I’m like, ‘Dang, I got to spend the rest of my life in here for something I didn’t do.’ And you know, I tried to kill myself,” Ansari told Linsey Davis on “ABC News Live Prime.”

“It felt like nobody didn’t put all the evidence together to see that I wasn’t the person in the first place. So things started getting overwhelming for me.”

Exonerated

Ansari, 39, was exonerated in 2019 by the Wayne County Circuit Court after it determined that Moises Jimenez, a former Detroit police detective withheld evidence for Ansari’s trial that would have implicated someone else as the shooter, according to the County of Wayne Office of the Prosecuting Attorney.

Jimenez received an anonymous tip that linked the shooter to the Mexican Drug Cartel, according to the complaint that released Ansari.

The officer withheld the evidence from Ansari’s 2013 trial, according to the lawsuit.

Jimenez’s attorneys told ABC News that the former detective claims that he provided all evidence he uncovered during his investigation and plans to appeal the $10 million lawsuit verdict.

There have been no reported arrests connected to the shooting since Ansari’s exoneration. Ansari was wrongfully arrested for the crime when he was 27 years old.