112TH US DEATH ROW INMATE FOUND INNOCENT

charges were dropped Tuesday against a man who spent 20 years on Pennsylvania´s death row for a murder that DNA evidence says he did not commit.
The decision makes Nicholas Yarris the first Pennsylvania death row inmate cleared by DNA evidence, but he will remain jailed pending appeals on crimes he committed after escaping from sheriff´s deputies 15 years ago.
Prosecutor Sheldon Kovach filed the motion Tuesday to drop the rape and murder charges in the 1981 death of a woman in the Philadelphia area.
"The commonwealth would not have sufficient evidence at this point to proceed," he said. Yarris, 42, told Delaware County Judge William Toal he bore the court system and its officials no ill will. "I wish you well," he said.
"Despite the 22 years that the commonwealth did its best to kill me, I used the opportunity to become a good man," said Yarris.
Family members and his lawyers said they hope to have Yarris home by Christmas.
A judge in September overturned Yarris´ 1982 conviction because DNA tests proved that genetic material found under the victim´s fingernails, on her undergarments and in a pair of gloves thought to have been worn by the killer did not belong to Yarris.
Yarris had maintained for two decades that he is innocent of the 1981 rape and killing of Linda Mae Craig, 32, of Boothwyn.
Prison guards and an inmate testified that Yarris confessed involvement in the crime while jailed on an unrelated charge. Yarris later said he faked knowledge of the killing because he thought prosecutors would treat him favourably in his other case if they thought they could use him as a witness.
Yarris was sentenced to death in 1983. He had escaped in February 1985 when he asked deputies to let him use a restroom while they were escorting him from prison to a court hearing. He was recaptured a month later in Florida.
Yarris became the 112th person to be freed from a US death row because of factual innocence, according to National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He is Pennsylvania´s fifth exoneree and the 10th of this year. In recent years, the number of exonerated people freed from death row due to actual innocence has slowly but steadily increased, and the NCADP expects this trend to continue.