Welcome back to our mini series Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam In the time of COVID, you know, social distancing orders were put in place well over a month ago, and on top of the tragic loss of life, we're starting to see the effects of isolation and restricted movement as they make their impact. For many, there's the specter of going without basic necessities when their businesses can't bear the idle time, or when stimulus money runs dry when
they can't get unemployment. But for those incarcerated, a potential death sentence looms as a very real possibility as they have no way of social distancing in our overcrowded prisons. And yet some people on the outside are ignoring the necessary precautions and even going so far as to demand an ill advised and straight crazy returned to business as usual. Clearly, the advice of our expert it's from the rothly convicted community,
is now more necessary, even essential than ever previously. We spoke to Damian Echols and Amanda Knox about the importance of structuring your time, keeping an exercise regimen, cleanliness, focusing the mind inward, and they gave us tips on combating the absence of physical touch and and this is really
important holding on to our senses of humor. This week we will talk to a man who was not only sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit, but who also unintentionally You're not going to leave this escape from death Row only to return to some new, fresh
version of hell. Now. He tells us about how the current state of affairs reminds him of his experiences on death Row, how he overcame his anger, escaped into literature, and about the detrimental role that the ego plays on our respective abilities to deal with being in our own versions of Lockdown. You can hear his entire story of triumph over tragedy in an episode so insane that we had to break it into two parts for episode five
of season nine. He's the author of Monsters and Madmen, the star of the documentary film The Fear of Thirteen. But mostly he's our friend, Nicky Harris on Coping in the time of COVID. Nick Yarris is here. Thank you for having me back on. It's a real honor to do this at a time that we're all struggling to handle Lockdown Europe in Oregon, Right, Yeah, I'm I'm in a small town on the coast of Oregon, just above California, and we're blessed by having only six thousand people in
the population. Well, Nick, you survived um death row in Pennsylvania at a time when it was so brutal. So you've been to hell and back and now here you are in the free world and experiencing a much milder, shall we say, sort of lockdown. But is it triggering for you to have to be sort of, you know, stationary and not have the freedom of movement that you've enjoyed now for so many years. It's actually um reinvigorating
all of my lessons learned from it. I had to replace the structure in my life when my my life hit a brick wall. When I was getting no new sensory input in my daily life to have memories of interactions with others, it was killing me. Initially I had no structure, and I realized that that learning process of giving myself structure every day while being locked in a six by nine cell has come back and rebounded again now to point towards Oh, okay, I'm okay with this.
So I used it to set up the structure. For the children in the house to have their school. We built them a little classroom. We're trying to have everything regimented because structure keeps the mind healthy. And how are you doing now? Right now? The worst thing that I'm facing, I guess is the same thing we're all facing. We have worry in our hearts, our loved ones. We can set it aside for ourselves, but we struggle with worry. Meant for everyone from a farm. My dad is eighty
five years old. He goes over and he picks up the newspaper every day, and he refuses to stop living his life, and he won't put on a mask. He said, I've lived through war and terrorism. I lived through all the worst things in life. If God wanted me, he would have gotten me sooner. I'm not going to stop living my life. But I'm not going to be a fool. Yeah. I think a lot of people are experiencing right now.
You know, we're all having a tough time with the isolation, but some of the people in our lives are not taking all of the precautions. For some, the issue is economic desperation, but for others, they feel like their rights are being infringed, rather than that this is temporary and for the common good. And I mean you actually had your freedom stolen without cause, So how did you persevere? What was the key for you that allowed you to,
you know, transcend it's probably the right word. This unbelievably terrible environment. And how can those lessons be applied for people who now are at home, frustrated, no work, no recreation activities, stuck in the walls, closing in um, money tight, all the other pressures that people are experiencing. How can
your experience help them? In real tongue, I'm I'm doing it with everyone in that same feeling that I had on death row, like and it goes back to a very terrible night in November when Huntington's prison was set on fire during a riot and I was locked up in the death row housing unit two hundred and twenty five of us all went quiet as we watched the prisoners across the court or burned the block across from us, knowing that the building structure was connected and it was
going to set us on fire, and the guards had already left us. So you sit there in those moments with this fear in your chest, like Is this real? Is this how it ends? And my next what will happen? How can I have control over these feelings? And right now our whole world is feeling this way. We didn't do anything to be put in lockdown. Why are we here enduring these fears when this has nothing to do with us. We didn't cause this mayhem around us, but
we're suffering through it. How do we deal with it? And the one thing that kept me going through it all was I refused to give up my humanity. My kindness was so important to me that I refused to feed the negative cycle, just like feeding into the negative news cycles now in today's social media. I refused to feed into the negative, believing that good was the only way going forward. And if I believed in that, then I could wait this out, see how it plays out,
and remember that it's a humbling for me. And I swear to God that death row experience is playing out right now in my life with me. There must have been times thick, I mean, you were free, aimed for a crime that they knew you didn't commit. Your life is in danger every day, not just from being executed, but from being beaten to death by guards other inmates, all the other deprivations there, there must have been moments when you felt bitter. No oh, yeah, oh, Jason, I
don't want to misplace this truth. But in my early days I was so bitter about having nothing that I would beat my head on the wall so hard by slamming it backwards into the wall. It was the only way I felt like I could keep going if I stayed angry. In first, I was consumed by the insult done to me and my family to be sentenced to death for a crime, for a murder of a woman I never met in my life. To have my parents cry and humiliation in the courtroom while the people taunted
them and laughed in their face. I was so angry that I thought the only way I'm gonna get through this is if I stay angry. And it consumed me, and I was so ashamed of that that it was only because of a miracle chance encounter. A man hung himself on my prison block. His cell was empty. The guards took me out of my cell to take me to the nurses stage and to patch my head up again. I'm walking back and the guard says to me, go in that cell and get them books he said, they'll
keep you from being angry. From somehow that moment and that chance encounter, I decided to try to stop being angry. And it was really hard to stop being angry. How embarrassing that I was so consumed by anger that I couldn't read more than a few pages. I started to pray for were a way to figure out how to become strong enough to handle this without anger and bitterness. And I couldn't articulate much. I didn't have the fluidity
of a beautiful vernacular that would come later. So I stripped all the photographs off the wall, and I put a photograph of myself up and I began to politely speak to the image before me of myself, hoping to give myself enough respect, love and encouragement, because that was the person that had to get me through this life. And in this transition, I found this wonderful sense that maybe if I stopped and looked at who I was for one minute, maybe I could possibly just hopefully love myself.
So I was looking for and it worked. I mean, had you not had that epiphany, there's no way you would be here today. You would have almost certainly died in prison, like I said, either at the hands of the state or at the hands of one of the many people who were trying to kill you. Um, and I know those stories. Well. The thing I found out, Jason,
that really is true. I watched I don't know four guys entered the prison system on death row, particularly on death row from a member of the du Pont family. On down. You know, people will high ilk suffer the worst when they go into lockdown. So the analogy is, the bigger the ego, the harder it is to be in lockdown. How much of an affront is all of this to you is a measure of your ego, and it will attack your health. It will cause you to
undo every good bond in your life. Some people can't really handle this because they're fucking egos so out of control that they really are affronted by this. How dare I, as an American have to sit in my house for four weeks because some Chinese person ate of back like
this is real? People are walking around in this country with the notion that this isn't affront to them in their lives, when in fact they're being taught how to be more polite, how to be less German spreading hell in the future to be more consistently conscientious of your own public health. And yet it's such an angry moment for so many people. You mentioned Neck about serving time with one of the tupont hairs. Can you talk about how did he adapt to them? Was he able to
somehow or other turn a corner like you did. It's amazing how it has to have the humbling first. A lot of people who do well in society, when they hit prison, they just break down. And it happened with John DuPont, it happened with others who were very well to do in society because their ego is inflated in life to the stature of how they live. Imagine one of these super wealthy people going from a yacht to the prison house. Man. It is such a demoralizing downfall
that they can't handle that. Jason. The one answer to the trouble people have when they acknowledge their ego, if they can acknowledge their ego, is what is your outlet. You can't mindlessly look at screens, you can't endlessly go on social media. That's gonna burn you out really quick. This is why I'm so grateful I can go back to my first love of reading. I love books for one thing. Each one taught me a different aspect of myself.
And if I go back and read one now, I realized the changes of who I was at the time that I read it the first time. Two now, is there a particular book or was there a particular book that meant the most to you that others may be able to benefit from? Great question, because one of the things that I recently did was I picked up The Prophet by Khalil Gribraun, and this is my touchstone book.
This book was my present at Christmas. I rewarded myself by re reading this one work because I felt so akin to its main character, al Mustafa, the Chosen who spent twelve years within a waltz, and on the day of his leaving, he was asked by everyone to give them parting wisdom knowledge of what he experienced. And the reason I did this is because I was so angry. At first. I thought it was flimsy, flimsy, fluozy bullshit, and I didn't like it, and I threw it against
the wall. My mind was so scrambled. I thought this was crazy. Why would I bother reading this? Crap. It wasn't until about two years later when I had the fluid it in my mind to really absorb that. I found Gabron's work so uplifting. So I sat down and I opened up the book, and I was so rewarded with this beauty of this writing. You see, Gabron suffered through the tragedy of losing all of his family members
to another plague. It was called tuberculosis, and his family moved to the Boston area from lebon On, and he was enraptured with trying to hold down the family farm in Lebanon while migrating back and forth to Boston on these ships, and his whole family perished during a three year period of his life while he wrote The Prophet. That's why I loved him. He took the worst tragedies of his life and turned it into the most beautiful book he could think of and gave that to the world.
That is what I make the analogy today of today's c. O. V. D. Hero was my personal hero. Khalil Gubron. Picking up that book the other day meant so much to me because it reinvigorated that touch, that field, that smell of art. There's nothing like it. Man. The other thing I wanted to touch on about reading is this, right now, studies have shown that we read on average about two hundred books a year in social media messaging. Of reading other people's words, we read them in snippets and you know,
five and ten minutes bounds. But we're not really reading the books that we should be reading. And this is where a lot of times we have to recognize we have to implement actual time away from a screen and into enjoying art and literature the way it's meant to be. We're doing it anyway, and it's a loss to us because we would rather sit there and watch the left and right argue about what's right or people's opinions, than to absorb some really cool literature and feel good about yourself.
Like I couldn't imagine sitting there day after day on a a retort to someone else's reply to someone else's words, an argument about a conspiracy, in all this crap, when I could be enjoying something truly invigorating from my brain. That's how we do this. My prison guards would walk past me and I would be so happy, so uplifted, so alive. They thought I was mentally off. It wasn't just that I read and therefore I was absorbing things
I left prison behind. M hm. So I want to talk to you about another innocent man that you met on death row in Pennsylvania way back in and of course you know I'm referring to Walter oh Grid. Just before this lockdown started, you were on your way to
Philadelphia to fight for him, right. I started out trying to drive across this country in a pickup truck to go get my friend Walter o Brod out of death row after twenty eight years of being on death row, wrongly, having the mother of the victim begging for his release in all this, only to be stopped cold by the judge. And I would have been still in Philadelphia begging for his release had I not listened to wisdom better than my own. Honestly, lately, I'm just I keep thinking about
my friend Gregory Ogrod, Walter's brother. Now that Anne Marie Fayhey, the mother of the victim, the little girl who my friend Walter Ogrod was falsely convicted of murdering, is begging for Walter's release, he kept saying, Man, she's such a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. Can I do anything to try and get her as signed c D from Bruce? That's
all he wants to do. This is a man who suffers from his brother being on death row right now for a crime that he didn't commit for the last twenty eight years, and his main concern is trying to show grace to the mother of the victim for her efforts to show grace to his brother. That's how I keep thinking about Jason. Isn't it wonderful that in the height of this horrible thing that we're going through, so
many good things are shining. Like Greg gives me so much hope because he's not allowing all of this negativity of his brother being cheated from being released to affect him from finding a way to go forward with good for his brother. And you know, I'm so inspired by you. And it's another thing I have to tell you, this man, I struggled before I met you. No one with your stature has given me any respect. I've done podcast around the world, but that's a a moment for that person. Sir.
You're the only sincere friend that has stayed true throughout this process, and it's because of you I'm going to keep standing up strong and making these efforts for people to see. This is the message right here, Jason, you and me man showing people that you might be in New York and I might be an organ but I love you, man, and I love the effort you make for other people. And good is gonna win, and you believe it and I believe it, and that's why we're
here today. So that all of us right now, if you hear my voice and you're struggling to handle this, we we get it, man, and we love you for it. And reach out to someone. Do the nice thing, man, don't reach out and tell your woes. Reach out and be someone else's answered prayer. Be the uplifting moment they need, and you'll feel so it's better for yourself. And Nick, Um, I'm really touched. And Um, you know you're someone who I look up to and I draw a tremendous amount
of inspiration from. So I love YouTube brother, and we will continue to fight this fight together. We will bring Walter home and we're gonna go get Bruce Springsteen's autographed for that wonderful woman who has been through such hardship and tragedy and is now showing such grace as you said. So yeah, and I like the one thing that you continue to do on the social media. You continue to share positive messaging that uplifts people who relieves them of
the stress with good neuralplasicity post. I love it that you always started the same way. I didn't know how much I needed to see a giraffe hug a donkey, but there it is, you know what I mean, and that really matters to someone. Jason. You're doing your part and that's what people need to hear. Those little things means something to someone somewhere, even if you didn't notice it, and that's what we got to keep alive. Yeah, hey man, brother,
So again, Nick, thank you for sharing your thoughts. You never ceased to amaze me, and I appreciate our friendship more than words can say. You know, I feel like you've already shared your words of wisdom with us. So I'm just gonna say, stay safe and I'll be looking forward to seeing and working with you as soon as we're allowed to travel again. Thank you for having me on and I'm really grateful to you. It never fails whenever I speak to Nick. I learned so much and
one of the most interesting things I just learned. I mean, we all know the importance of literature, but we tend to you know, neglect it or take it for granted sometimes. But from Nick, I learned that we read equivalent of two hundred books a year in terms of the total number of words that we consume, but we consume them in such sort of trite ways right on social media
and little bites. But reading real art, reading some of the classics is something that so many people who were wrongly convicted, so many of our Exonorey community, have told me that's one of the things that got them through as Nick did, that that lifted their spirits, even turned their their whole you know, mojo around was reading Victor francole Man Search for Meaning or or some of the other classics the Prophet. Do you hear these things come
up over and over again. You know, if I learned anything talking to Nick, it's stay positive and always be kind. Nick practices radical kindness, and I think we can all take something from that. I mean, right now more than ever, I think it's the time when we can help each other. You could be someone else's you know, lifeline for we go any further, I want to thank all our our heroes. Um they've always been heroes, but now they're finally being
recognized as such. And by that I mean, of course, our healthcare providers, all the essential workers, the grocery store people, the delivery people, everybody who is, you know, helping us to keep going, risking their own safety to keep society from coming apart. So in the meantime, I hope you've been listening and hearing Laura and I Writer and Steve Drizzen as they shed light on why someone would ever admit to a crime they didn't commit in Rawful Conviction,
False Confessions. I'll be returning with the new season of Rawful Conviction with Jason Flaman May and next week we're going to have a very special guest. I'm gonna leave it a mystery, but you're gonna want to hear this one. So come back next week for more alternative perspective on life and living in the time of COVID. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts,
it really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at
Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one