What it’s like to finally be exonerated after spending 22 years on death row for a murder you didn’t commit

Nick Yarris tells Emily Sexton Brown how, despite being wrongfully locked up for two decades, he’s not angry

The Overtake
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read

Imagine not only being incarcerated for something you didn’t do, but then being condemned to death.

For most normal people, being accused of something you didn’t do, however insignificant, is very hard to stomach. So imagine how Nick Yarris felt having his life taken away before his very eyes for a crime he knew nothing about.

Nick Yarris fell in love with the UK after visiting Parliament to talk about the death penalty. He now lives in Lincolnshire.

An unexpected incarceration

In 1981, 19-year old Yarris was pulled over for a driving violation by the Pennsylvania police department which quickly escalated to a heated confrontation between Yarris and the police officer, resulting in Yarris being arrested for attempted murder of the police officer.

While he was in custody, details emerged of a woman in the local area who had been stabbed, raped and brutally murdered.

Thinking quickly, Yarris claimed that an acquaintance who he thought had died had murdered this woman — a desperate ploy to escape jail in the form of a plea bargain. But the police ruled out this suspect, putting Yarris directly in the firing line as the main suspect of the rape and murder of Linda May Craig.

In a few days, a traffic violation had quickly escalated into two separate and very serious charges. Evidence from the crime scene was collected but it took two gruelling decades for this evidence to prove Yarris was innocent.

Guilty verdict

Describing how he felt the moment he found out his unfortunate fate as that guilty verdict was read out, he says he was thinking more about his family than himself.

“I was overwhelmed with the thoughts of what being arrested would do to my parents,” he says.

“To be charged with rape and accused of murder for psychologically made up claims made me feel so much pity for my parents being tormented.”

“I knew I had done nothing, but I cared about them more than myself.” It’s perhaps a sign of his character that even in that moment of what for many people would have only been pure despair, he was thinking about those he loved.

The US houses 22% of the world’s prisoners

Life inside

Spending such a long time inside, Yarris experienced huge variations in treatment and conditions in the prison. “My days of incarceration changed based on the era,” he says. “In the 1980s it began in total silence. It quickly became very loud once crack cocaine forced the prison to share death row with disciplinary inmates in the housing units.”

Staying sane in such unpleasant conditions was clearly a challenge. Yarris says: “I used music and reading to erase my world, so basically I read for up to 16 hours a day for 23 years.”

Pennsylvania’s death row was only implemented in November 1982, the year Yarris was convicted and sentenced to death. He explains: “All men sentenced by a jury (or by judge after a jury recommended death) were to be locked in a cell 23 hours a day. I was held in this way until January 16th 2004. My sentence formally was imposed on my mothers 50th Birthday January 24th 1983. The jury recommended it July 1st 1982.”

Spending countless hours locked up, Yarris still managed to form close bonds with other inmates while in prison despite being in solitary confinement for a considerable while. He talks about two men who were also on death row with him — Ernie Simmons, who has since been released, and Walter Ogrod, who is hoping for a release soon. “I’ll never forget my promise to them — that I would fight for their freedom” he says.

Obviously, prison is no easy feat at any time or juncture, but I ask Yarris to recall his very worst memory.

“My worst memory is living through the 1989 riot in Huntingdon Prison. At one point, the buildings were on fire and we knew they would let us burn. I then watched as black clad stormtroopers abused hundreds of men all night. It was a scene no one should have to recall.”

Yarris is determined to think only about the future.

Lasting memories

Amazingly enough, Yarris also remembers some good times he had including his most precious memory: “The day I held my mother in a county jail visit after no human hand had touched me for 14 years. Even though I had to wear shackles on my legs, I knew a sense of the word ‘home’ like no other while she held me on December 3rd 2003.”

When someone’s happiest memory in over two decades is that their mother held them, after having had no human contact for so many years, I’m wondering how Yarris manages to not feel severe hatred towards the American justice system. He explains this later in our conversation.

Yarris throughout his entire sentence claimed he was innocent and wanted a retrial based on insufficient evidence. In 1989, he became one of the first ever Pennsylvania’s death row inmates to be granted a post-conviction DNA trial. Testing went on throughout the ’90s with no success because the technology was still in an early stage.

Then in 2003, a Dr Edward Blake conducted further testing and investigation into Yarris’ case, the results from this more advanced testing excluded Yarris from all evidence and material in connection with the crime that happened in 1981.

Freedom

Yarris was finally released in 2004. 23 years later.

TV documentaries such as Making A Murderer have highlighted elements of injustice within the American justice system in recent years. I ask Yarris how he feels towards them.

“I feel now more than ever we can make strides in our judicial system and I am always very hopeful of better,” he says.

“I have nothing negative to say because what happened to me has happened to many others and I need to always remember that it was not personal what happened to me.”

While these documentaries help us understand what went wrong and hopefully prevent these miscarriages of justice happening again, Yarris will never get those two decades back.

For him, it’s time to stop looking to the past and entirely focus on his future. He beams: “I just had a baby girl and I’m the happiest I’ve been in my life. That is all I know my parents would have wanted for me in the aftermath of all this.”

Yarris’s book about his life, The Fear of 13 is published by Penguin Random House, and available on Amazon and other stores like the Book Depository. A film, also called The Fear of 13, has been made based on Yarris’s life. You can find out more on Nick Yarris’s website.

This is an extract from an interview on true crime blog thebreached.com. Follow them on Twitter to keep up with the latest.

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