Nick Yarris Spent 21 Years Behind Bars for a Crime He Didn’t Commit—Now His Story Is on Broadway

On January 16, 2004, Nick Yarris was released from a Pennsylvania prison after spending 21 years behind bars, many of them in solitary confinement and on death row, for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. 

He became the first person sentenced to death in Pennsylvania to be exonerated by DNA evidence. To this day, his case remains one of the most cited examples of how flawed investigations, unreliable testimony and limited forensic technology can result in devastating miscarriages of justice.

In the more than 20 years since his exoneration, Yarris has shared his story in books and interviews—an effort that has helped bring wider attention to wrongful convictions. He was also the subject of a 2015 documentary, The Fear of 13, which has been adapted into a stage play with two-time Oscar-winner Adrien Brody (The Brutalist, The Pianist) currently playing Yarris on Broadway.

Despite those harrowing decades, Yarris maintained a hopeful outlook on what he endured. "I had an enormous responsibility not just to survive but to become a good man because I had all of my family's hopes on my shoulders because they walked around outside without the shield that I carried knowing I hadn't done anything," he told The Guardian in 2004, after his release. 

Here’s how his case unfolded, he fought to prove his innocence and the way one of his lawyers now fights for more cases like his via the Innocence Project.

Yarris had a troubled adolescence that stemmed from a horrific event in his childhood. When he was 7, a teenage boy beat and raped him, according to the BBC, and he suffered a head injury in the attack that left him with brain damage. As he got older, he coped with the trauma by drinking and taking drugs.

In December 1981, while high on methamphetamine, 20-year-old Yarris was arrested after a routine stop for a traffic violation led to an altercation between him and police, ending in his arrest for attempted kidnapping and murder of a police officer.

While in custody for this offense, in hopes of gaining his freedom, he told police he knew who’d committed the murder of Linda Mae Craig, a 32-year-old woman who had been raped and killed four days earlier. When the acquaintance he accused was ruled out by police, Yarris then became the prime suspect. In 1982, he was convicted of murder, rape and abduction and sentenced to death.

In 1989, Yarris became one of Pennsylvania’s first death row inmates to demand post-conviction DNA testing to prove his innocence, per the Innocence Project. What followed was rounds of DNA testing of various pieces of evidence, all of which failed to produce conclusive results.

Over the years, Yarris watched five DNA tests come back inconclusive. He went 14 years without touching another human being and missed the funeral of his younger brother, who died of a drug overdose, the Brooklyn Rail reported.

Yarris passed his time in solitary confinement by reading books—first crime thrillers, then legal papers and textbooks, in hopes of helping his case. He also studied religion, tried to help fellow inmates who had been wrongfully convicted and wrote to penpals around the world, according to The Guardian. As the years dragged on, he eventually fell into despair. 

"In 2002 I was ready to be executed and I asked to drop my legal appeals so that the execution process would be carried out,” he told the BBC. 

Then, in 2003, Yarris was excluded from all biological material connected with the crime. The court vacated his conviction, making him the 140th person in the United States to be exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing—and the 13th to be exonerated from death row. However, a 1985 conviction for escape with connected charges in Florida kept him behind bars. After that sentence was reduced to time served, he was finally released in January 2004. Craig’s killer has never been identified.

In the aftermath of his exoneration, Yarris immediately began speaking out against capital punishment and advocating for others who have been wrongfully convicted. His case also ties into a larger legacy of fighting for wrongfully convicted individuals. One of Yarris’ lawyers, Christina Swarns, serves as the executive director of the Innocence Project, a non-profit first founded in 1992 that has gone on to help free or exonerate more than 250 people. The Innocence Project also has contributed to more than 250 state and federal reforms.

When the documentary The Fear of 13 came out in 2015, Yarris told the Innocence Project that he was “astounded by the many wonderful reactions” to it. Now, audiences will get to hear his story again through the stage adaptation, which began performances March 19 on Broadway. The play, directed by David Cromer, also stars Tessa Thompson as Jacki, a volunteer who visits the prison and has a series of conversations with Yarris. “He’s a remarkable man,” Brody said of Yarris during a press conference for the play, according to New York Theatre Guide. “I feel a responsibility in telling his story faithfully. Nick manages to exude this tremendous interest in others. He’s worked tirelessly on exonerating others.”

Yarris keeps moving forward, in spite of the two decades he lost to that wrongful conviction. “I held on to my humanity, no matter what,” he told The Guardian in 2024, when Brody was performing The Fear of 13 in London. “It’s the only thing I’m proud of. In fact, I allowed death row to enhance it.”