CNN Political Commentator and former Obama administration official Van Jones delivers an incisive examination of the state of politics in Tennessee. He returns to his home state in the lead-up to the Republican primary election on Super Tuesday. 

In April 2023, Tennessee's Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to expel two Black lawmakers a week after they joined a gun reform protest in the chamber prompted by a deadly shooting at a Nashville school. This remarkably rare and emotionally charged decision set the scene for Jones' return to his home state and his former place of employment in the state capitol, where he interned for the House Majority Leader in 1989. Jones unpacks how Tennessee's politics have swung sharply to the right since then by examining how gerrymandered redistricting, racial tensions, and "culture war" rhetoric have transformed the state government into a conservative supermajority. The trend set by Tennessee has played out across the southern US.

"In the Tennessee in which I was born and raised, we always had our struggles. But people usually tried to treat each other in a decent and neighborly way." said Jones. "But I returned to find the state legislature that launched my political career transformed beyond recognition — by a ham-fisted, hard-hearted politics of open hostility to minority viewpoints."

Tennessee represents a national tug-of-war over the direction of the country's politics at large. Jones speaks with politicians on both sides of the aisle to get their take on the tribalism between parties and its implications for the future of governing. This episode features interviews with reinstated Democratic State Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, Republican State Representative Gino Bulso, Republican Sumner County Commissioner Matthew Shoaf, Chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party Hendrell Remus, local organizers, and even members of Jones' family.

This episode follows CNN Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper's efforts to shine a light on the harrowing story of C.J. Rice, a Philadelphia man convicted of attempted murder in 2013. Two years before his conviction, Rice, then 17 years old, was shot three times, with a bullet fracturing his pelvis, making it nearly impossible for him to walk. He turned to his childhood physician and Tapper's father, Dr. Theodore Tapper, to help him recover. But just three weeks after Rice was shot, he was accused of shooting four people and fleeing the scene, which, according to Dr. Tapper, would have been virtually impossible to commit in his poor physical state. Despite Dr. Tapper testifying to that fact, Rice was later convicted of these crimes in 2013 and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.

After speaking with his father about the case, Jake Tapper published a thorough, long-form investigation in The Atlantic in October 2022 called "This Is Not Justice: A Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment," diving into what happened the night of the shooting, how little evidence there was against Rice, and revealing how ineffective representation led to his wrongful conviction. Rice's attorneys, Karl Schwartz, Amelia Maxfield of the Exoneration Project, and Nilam Sanghvi of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, made this precise argument that Rice was denied his Sixth Amendment right to adequate counsel to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. District Attorney Larry Krasner's office investigated the matter and agreed. On the morning of Monday, March 18, a Philadelphia judge granted a motion from the Philadelphia District Attorney exonerating Rice. C.J. Rice is a free man after more than twelve years in prison.

"Covering C.J.'s struggle and the efforts of my dad and the amazing lawyers to get him out of prison has been one of the most remarkable and rewarding journalistic experiences of my life," Tapper said. "I'm so glad the story has a happy ending, and I am immensely grateful to The Atlantic and to CNN for giving me the platforms to tell this story."

In an emotional reunion, Tapper and his father reconnect with Rice, who speaks for the first time in an expansive interview. In "Justice Delayed: The Story of C.J. Rice," Tapper recreates the scene of the shooting and the events that followed to illustrate clearly how the system failed Rice. The episode also follows Rice's time in prison in his own words through the powerful letters Rice sent to Dr. Tapper throughout the years.