Life after Death Row

NICK YARRIS IS sipping tea in the tranquil surroundings of a conservatory in suburban London. He looks every bit the American traveller, dressed in blue jeans, a black T-shirt and brown suede cowboy boots, and sporting a necklace adorned with a silver crucifix. He stands at 6'1'' (1.85m), with an athletic build and closely cropped grey hair. Tanned, untroubled features set off his clear hazel eyes. All in all, he exudes little of the sense of anger or anguish you'd expect to find in a man who has spent the greater part of his life wrongly imprisoned on death row.

22 years of hell

Nick is only 42, but he spent 22 years death row. I went 14 years without touching another human being, he tells me in a calm East Coast drawl. But I had this incredible felling of knowing the truth would come out, and it was worth every year waiting for that.
In 1982, Yarris was sentenced to death for the abduction, rape and murder of 32-year-old Linda Mae Craig, a sales attendant and mother-of-three from Delaware, Pennsylvania. The bulk of the evidence against him came from a fellow inmate who made a deal with the district attorney to swap false information about Yarris in return for a reduced sentence and the privilege of conjugal visits. The only physical evidence prosecutors offered was semen that had been tested only for blood type. That blood type implicated Yarris, along with 20 percent of all American males.
He may have been a jobless, criminalized junkie, addicted to amphetamines and going nowhere, but Yarris wasn't a killer. Nonetheless, he was sent to death row where he spent 22 of his 42 years.
He was denied human contact throughout his incarceration. All contact was either by phone - timed 15 minute monitored conversations - or by prison visit where he was handcuffed and shackled, sitting behind thick glass. For 14 years, he was not allowed to touch another human being. In 1983, he was moved to the State Correctional Institute at Huntingdon, which had been built before the turn of the century, and things got worse. For two years he wasn't even allowed to talk. When I got there, there were only 6 of us on 'the row', he recalls. And it was hell. If you talked or made any noise, you got beaten by guards, and the nurse jabbed you with psychotropic drugs, like Thorazine. Yarris explains how he was not allowed to talk in his own prison cell. Imagine it, 21 years old, sentenced to die, and you're not allowed to speak in your own cell.
Whenever he moved out of his cell he was locked into leg irons and chains with a black box put around handcuffs to restrain his wrists and prevent him from picking the lock. We got 20 minutes of exercise every other day, and if you wanted a shower, you had to go out to the yard.

Letting go

It was an awful existence, and Yarris's only hope was that they would finally get round to executing him. But even that hope was remote: around 250 people are on death row in Pennsylvania, but only three have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. It was no surprise that Yarris gave up on life. He wrote to the governor volunteering to die, and at one stage sat in his cell with a razor blade in his hand agonising over whether to slit his wrists.
He is philosophical about this low period now: I think that's the only way you can survive because it's only through letting go that you can gain the strength to carry on, he says. I'm not angry, because I simply don't have that luxury when so many people have given so much for me. And if I can eat spaghetti with a plastic spoon for 20 years - which is my definition of hell - I can do anything!
Part of what kept Yarris going throughout his death row ordeal was his correspondence with a dozen pen pals like Mary Vaughan, a Catholic from north London. She was introduced to him by the rights organisation Human Writes, and her faith and support gave him the human contact so lacking in prison. Yarris feels deeply indebted for her friendship and has been, he explains, profoundly changed by my journey. Vaughan's support gave him the strength to use his time inside constructively. He taught himself how to read and write in order to learn about the law and the ins and outs of DNA testing. When he became bored of reading, he taught himself to paint, using his own hairs glued to the end of a plastic spoon as a brush (because a standard paintbrush was considered a potentially lethal weapon).
These skills allowed him to come to terms with his situation, and talk openly and eloquently about his incarceration. Yarris had been in jail on a minor charge when he learned of the murder of Linda Mae Craig in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Suffering withdrawal symptoms from amphetamines, he believed he would be freed if he could tell investigators he knew the killer's identity. Yarris gave the police the name of an associate whom he had been told had died of an overdose. Investigators were infuriated when they discovered that this man was not only alive and well, but had since cleaned up his act, got a job, and had a rock-solid alibi for the time of the murder. They punished Yarris by leaking to other inmates that he was a snitch. For days he endured regular beatings and torture from other inmates. In an effort to save himself, Yarris asked what would happen if he had participated in the crime, but was not the murderer. The beatings stopped, and Yarris was charged with capital murder. During the trial in June 1982, the prosecution refused to hand over some 20 pages of documents which would later be revealed to include other physical evidence and conflicting witness accounts. There was no confession, no murder weapon, fibres or fingerprints, no eyewitnesses and a credible alibi. Yet Yarris was found guilty, and sent to death row.
On March 20, 1988 he became the first Death Row inmate in the US to request DNA testing to prove his innocence. After 22 years in jail, Nick was exonerated by enhanced DNA testing. Finally, on January 16, 2004 he was released, all convictions and sentences in Pennsylvania quashed.

Useless punishment

Nick's story is not unique. Since 1973, 116 prisoners have been released from death row in the US after evidence emerged of their innocence. Some had come close to execution after spending many years under sentence of death. Recurring features in their cases include prosecutorial or police misconduct; the use of unreliable witness testimony, physical evidence, or confessions; and inadequate defence representation. Other US prisoners have gone to their deaths despite serious doubts over their guilt.
In January 2000, following the exoneration of the 13th death row prisoner found to have been wrongfully convicted in the state since the USA resumed executions in 1977, the then Governor of Illinois, George Ryan, declared a moratorium on executions. In 2003, he pardoned four death row prisoners and commuted all 167 other death sentences in the state. Despite this moratorium, 59 prisoners were executed in the USA in 2004 - the third highest total after China and Iran - bringing the year-end total to 944 executed since the use of the death penalty was resumed. The 900th execution was carried out on  March 3, 2004. More than 3,400 prisoners were under sentence of death as of  January 1, 2005.
Apart from the potential to kill innocent people, statistics show that capital punishment does not act as a deterrent. In the past ten years, the number of executions in the US has increased while the murder rate has declined. Some commentators have maintained that the murder rate has dropped because of the increase in executions. However, during the last 10 years, the murder rate in non-death penalty states has remained consistently lower than the rate in states with the death penalty. Texas has legally killed more than 200 people since 1982, but still has one of the highest crime rates in the country. The death penalty is also extremely expensive. Since New York reinstated the death penalty in 1995, New York taxpayers have spent at least $170 million pursuing capital cases without a single execution taking place. Most state studies have found that a system of life without parole is significantly cheaper than the death penalty system, even when including the costs of long-term imprisonment. The death penalty's cost diverts resources from other areas, including crime prevention and victims' services.

Boundless joy

When Yarris left prison he had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C, and thought he only had three years to live. A dentist didn't take care to clean his utensils during routine work in 1993, he says shaking his head. I wasn't alone. There's a hepatitis epidemic in Pennsylvania, with about 70 percent of inmates infected. Nick explains, though, that during a trip to St. Mary's Cathedral in Poland with one of his pen pals from Human Writes earlier this year, he felt a burning sensation in his liver. He nearly passed out, and had to be helped out of the building. Since then, though, his Hepatitis has been in complete remission, and he is no longer terminal. Whether or not this event is evidence of a miracle Nick will not say, but he is not counting his blessings. The chances of God giving me back my freedom and my health is a miracle in itself, he says.
And listening to Nick recount his sensations at regaining his freedom is moving in itself, as his eyes glisten with tears and his voice cracks with emotion. It was so amazing, he explains. I don't know if there are words to describe that feeling of being alive again, standing there in the prison car park and holding my mother. I'm the happiest guy in the world when it rains because I'm allowed to feel the rain.
I offer no more than the lessons of my life to lend to any reverence for the precious gifts in your day that pass by without notice; caught in time's easy grip, and lost to your sight. If it is worth knowing, then perhaps my exchange of being allowed to rise from 'faceless and forgotten' to remind you of what passed by, will make me feel that I'm making use of this that I have paid dearly to acquire.