Joe Rogan - Nick Yarris' Incredible Story of Being Wrongfully Sentenced to Death Row

3, 2, 1. Stir it up, Nick. We're live. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Put the ear cups on and cheers, sir. Oh, man. Thank you, Joe. Thanks for being here, man. Yeah, thank you for bringing me out here, man. I know we meant to do this before, but I hope now with all this good energy between us, we can do this properly for your audience. Yeah, for sure. Listen, man, to say that you've had a crazy experience in this life is one of the most understated things a person could ever say. I mean, where do we begin, right? Let's tell everybody your story. So you were wrongfully committed of murder. You spent 22 years on death row before you were exonerated by DNA evidence. Hello, everyone. My name is Nick Harris, and I was, as Joe said, convicted and sentenced to die for a rape and murder I didn't commit at the age of 21 in 1981. A woman named Mrs. Craig was murdered in Delaware. I had never met the woman. I was in prison on unrelated charges, and I stupidly made up a story to try and get out of those charges. The police soon realized that I was a liar, and they fabricated the charges around me then. So it's ironic that in a few days you're going to Upper Derby, Pennsylvania, and that's where the murder happened, really, basically. And Linda Mae Craig was leaving her job at 4.05 p.m. on December 15, 1981. She's going home. She gets abducted. I don't know any of this, but I tried in desperation to get out of a lie that this officer put on me for... I got pulled over in a stolen car. The cop beats me up. He puts charges on me. I'm facing life imprisonment, and I'm a junkie, because all of my life I was destroyed by what happened to me at the age of seven. I had my head beaten him by a man with a rock in his hand after he sexually assaulted me, and I did all the stupid things that people can do in the aftermath. I kept it a secret, and I let it foster all the anger in me. I became very aggressive as a child, and I ended up in trouble all the time. When I was in prison on these unrelated charges to the murder, I stupidly fell into that mindset of desperation of trying to get out of it. So the police put a prisoner in a cell next to me. He said I confessed to him. I was given a three-day trial. I was sentenced to death and put on death row. And then, stupidly, I escaped from prison in 1985 and ended up on the FBI's most wanted list. How'd you get out? I was being transported to court, and the sheriffs were being cool with me at first. They were talking about what was going on in Philly. They were two nice guys, like 68, 67. And we drove five hours from one of the hardest prisons in America called Huntington, and I left there after spending two years of my first two years in silence. So if you opened your mouth, they would come in and beat your head in. So I was so glad to get in the car because my mom was waiting in my lawyer's office because they were going to give me a review of my trial because they withheld so much evidence. So I was eager to go to court, and it was the coldest day of 1985, February 15th. We stopped at a gas station in Exeter, Pennsylvania. And as I got out of the car, the officer driving pulled past the cubicles. Now we all got out of the car and ran over to the cubicle together, and I went in and started peeing. And the officer's holding a door for me, and my eyeglasses start fogging up. You know what I mean? Because you go from the freezing cold to the warm to the cold, your eyeglasses. So all I know is I turn around, and I come out, and he has the door like that, and I put my head down, go under his arm, and I turn left and go back to the car, and the dude smoking a cigarette doesn't know that his partner went in the cubicle to piss. And as I'm running back to the dude, he pulls his pistol out and point blank shoots at me, Joe, like pow. And as it went past my face, I was like, oh shit. I hit the ground. I ran, and he followed me with the gun. I could feel it like I was waiting for him to blast me, you know? Why did he shoot at you? Because he thought I overpowered his partner. He doesn't know. His testimony at trial was I turn around, Nick's running at me, my partner's down or gone. I pulled my gun, and he runs, and I wasn't going to let a death row prisoner run, so I tried to stop him. I shot. So I run around the corner. I hit the ground. I ripped all the skin off my hands. I run around the corner, and I fly towards this restaurant, and there's all these people innocently eating dinner. And I'm running right towards the plate glass window because he ain't going to blast me, you know? And I ran like I knew he couldn't shoot, and then I shot around the corner, and I ran down to a gas station. I tried to steal a car. That didn't work. And I ran like 400 yards, 400 yards, 400 yards, and I hid behind the car I just escaped from. And I was laying in the weeds behind the gas station about 50 yards from him. They were screaming, who was the bigger idiot for letting this happen? And I was thinking, oh my God, like what am I doing? What do I do, Joe? Like, how do I just jump up and say, wait a minute, it was a mistake, you know? He already tried to shoot me in the face. So I go high behind the police station, and next four hours, oh my God, I'm chased by a helicopter. And he chases me, and he pins me, and he chases me. And I was so fit that I ran for four hours through the woods without care what the branches did to my face or nothing, man. I blew out both quads. I did my hamstrings. I ripped my feet open. I ran so hard in terror that I didn't care, man. And I got away. And I made it all the way to Florida, and I was going to leave the country and all this, and I said, I got to go back. How did you get to Florida? I stole a dude's wallet in New York, and I got on an airplane, and I went down to Florida, and I tried to rob a drug dealer, and I tried to just, I was sitting there. I was so angry, I was going to kill myself. I was on, I'll never forget this day. I didn't want my folks to see me in prison handcuffs no more, you know? So I was going to buy a raft, and I was going to go out in the ocean, and I was going to have one last party with all the foods that I loved. Then I was going to stab the raft, wait for the sharks after I cut my wrist, you know? And then I was going to cap myself and go. Then I said, no, I'm going back. So I turned myself back in. They put me on death row in Florida, and I went back, and I faced it, you know? Say beat me for four minutes, man. They broke my face, broke my back, crushed me, man, tortured me, and I thought, I'm going to get you back, you know? For all the days you made me go in a cage and beat some other prisoner while you stood there with a club laughing at me. I'm going to get you back. I'm going to make sure I start being a loving person again. So I'm sitting there in 1985, 1986 with 105 years plus a death penalty, and I decided, fuck this, I'm going to be a nice guy. So I started to learn. Okay. I suffer from aphasia. I had my head beaten and went to rock. What is aphasia? Aphasia can be identified simply in people who have stuttering disorder. Their brain and their vernacular abilities are distorted by a disruption in their brain. Either their brain is functioning too fast or their mouth is functioning too fast. There's a combination of misfiring. And aphasia can be through trauma or through genetics. And aphasia affected my life so much as a young person. I never had the respect to listen to people because I couldn't function. I couldn't articulate. I couldn't speak. When I was at trial, people spoke words that I didn't understand, and it frustrated me. And when I tried to speak and I stuttered, people would be like, come on, retard. What do you got to say? So after that beating, where they beat me for four minutes and they broke my face, I began practicing speaking to myself. Every day I learned new words and I taught myself how to correctly articulate that word into a sentence beautifully for my own self in my cell every day. And then I became very, very good at writing. I began helping other prisoners. I became the most dangerous prisoner that they held because I cared about other men. I wrote to their mothers. I wrote letters to their lawyers. I gave up opportunities for people to write books about me so I could help another innocent man. I did all those things because that's how I got back at them for what they did to me. So in 1988, I'm sitting in my cell and I read about DNA. And I knew right then I could prove my innocence. So I was the first man in America in February of 1988 to ask for DNA testing to prove my innocence. And they threw away all the autopsy material. And when I discovered new evidence, they destroyed that. And this woman who came to meet me and start visiting me fell in love with me and she believed in me. So she stood by me and told me that she would be with me either to the gal whose walk or to the moment I proved my innocence. And for nine years, she stood by me, you know. And finally, we found some evidence that was testable in 1995. What was the evidence? It was sperm from a rape. And it was being sent out here to California to Dr. Edward Blake. And it broke open in transport and spilled. So Jackie left me. Had nothing left. And then they put me in a special unit and started torturing me. I keep this part quiet. I never told the story. It would ruin what happened in the fear of 13. It's now out on Netflix. But they finally closed down the old prison I was in for 12 years where the average rate of survival was only five. And I was one of the hardest Jews there and I made it. They closed the prison down and they opened up Greene County Supermax. And the courts ordered that every prisoner in Pennsylvania be allowed out of their cell for eight hours. The administration looked at each other and said, fuck that, not the crazy cannibals and not the serial killers, not the dudes that have been in cell and raping each other. So they picked 48 of us out and they put us in Pittsburgh in a special penitentiary setting in which we were in a sealed unit. And they put all these guards in there that weren't allowed to touch other prisoners because they were so violent and told them, we're giving you the craziest of the crazy. You know, Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Land was a real man, right? His name was Gary Heidnik. He abducted black women in Philadelphia and put them in a pit under his house and fed one of them to the other survivors because he was building a master race. He was my neighbor, man. Like so they started torturing us and doing all this psychological crazy shit to us where they were feeding us to each other like wolves. So I kept it all quiet until this year when once again, misfortune fell in my life and I released Monsters of Mad Men, a new book that I was going to give you today. And I thought, you know, I got to tell that story, you know, but it's been so hard to come back from these moments, Joe. It's just like I look at what they did to me and how I went to that moment where the DNA is gone. Jackie leaves me. And so I find that I'm dying from hepatitis C that they did when they infected me of it when they broke my teeth, when they beat me. So I asked to be executed. I said, I studied all the world's religions. I read over 9000 books. I did everything in piety. My mother asked me to do. I was impressed. I don't want to die like Dale Carter did with the guards coming to his cell and taunting him, you know, teasing him and listening to a man screaming agony because the bile in his belly is killing him. So I wrote to the courts and I asked to be executed. I said, fuck it, man. I want to die as a man I love who can respect himself. The court intervened and ordered the DNA testing that was going to be done on evidence is spelled in July of 2003. The DNA test come back and he proved me innocent. How did so the the the evidence spilled and they just captured it once it spilled. It was in a box with all this evidence. And Dr. Edward Blake, who did the OJ Simpson trial DNA said that there would be challenges to it if he did the DNA in 1999, 1998. In 2003, they had advanced mitochondrial DNA separation so well that he felt confident in his results. So the federal court got involved and said, look, I don't want to have this man executed. I want the DNA done. So they did that. And it was amazing that on the day that I called the lawyers, they revealed a truth to me. I called his lawyer and I'm like, what's up? He goes, Nick, we got DNA from three separate sources that prove you innocent. And I said, that's amazing, Mike. I'm really grateful. He goes, you know, we used to tell people you're crazy, that we never believed in you. I'm really sorry for that. Man, really? You want to take away my joy now, man. So I was really downcast that the day I called my mother, my brother Mike, he was having a seizure at her feet because he was an alcoholic after he fell off a roof and he died shortly after. So it just went fucking crazy from there. They take me off death row and they put me in a psychological cell and they tell me they can't trust me, that no human being who has had done to them what we've done to you cannot be angry. If we open this door up and we let you out, you're going to get us. So we're going to leave you until the day they let you out. We're going to leave you in this cell because we don't trust you not to kill us for what we did to you. What did they do to you? They used to have a thing called Gladiator Day. So the lieutenant would be off on a Sunday and the guards who started to come from the Philadelphia area were black and they didn't like the guards up in the hillbillies beating on black prisoners. So a weird thing happened where this lieutenant came up with the idea, well look, let's let the prisoners get this frustration out of you guys. You pick out the biggest guy and you pick out this guy. So one day I'm sitting there minding my own business and they open up my cell and there's four of them with clubs. You're up. So I got to go in the cage and I got to go and hurt somebody while they stand outside. And if you don't fight they're going to come in and they're going to beat you worse than you can beat a man or get beaten by one man. So they did all this for their entertainment. Were they ever punished for this? Not until after the riot when one of them testified against others for the murder and stuff. I watched 11 people commit suicide. I've been stabbed, strangled, beaten senseless. The guards used to taunt me because I was accused of a psychological murder of going out and stalking this poor woman because she looked like my girlfriend. They said, so I was never treated like a prisoner. I was treated with deference. The worst word I know in the English dictionary, the way I was treated was so harsh that it was cruel beyond cruel. And yet all I wanted to do was have enough within me to learn to beautifully speak so that on a day that they executed me, I could tell them how much I cared about myself. I was more important to me than living because somehow when you suffer like I have suffered, your head cracks open and you have a hypersensitivity to life. So that when you touch the human beings, you never forget the 14 years no one was allowed to touch you. You know what? Fuck this. I ain't crying no more. It's all right, man. There's nothing wrong with crying. No, I just thought about it. How much you know? You know what, Joe? I do because I feel bad for the heart. You shouldn't feel bad for crying. No, because I look in your arms and your eyes and I see the hurt that I'm causing you for doing this. Don't worry about that, man. All right. Well, this is what I'm doing is trying to imagine what your life has been like. Don't you worry about me at all. I'm harder than life and I'm kinder than love. Secretly I'm a saint. I never hurt no one. I try my best to be played every day. And I've had misfortune and I returned. And I'm very sorry that I sit in this chair today after it came about. You see, I believe in good. I believe good is going to win, Joe.