Full title: NICHOLAS YARRIS v. DELAWARE COUNTY, ET. AL
Court: United States District Court, E.D. Pennsylvania
Date published: Feb 25, 2005
Facts
This case stems from the December 16, 1981, kidnapping, rape, and murder of Linda Mae Craig. Craig was kidnapped after she left her job at the Tri-State Mall in Delaware. Her body was found the following morning in a church parking lot in Chichester Township, Delaware County.
Four days later, Nicholas Yarris assaulted a police officer during a traffic stop. The officer’s weapon discharged during the fight and Yarris was charged with attempted murder and incarcerated in the Delaware County Prison. While in prison, Yarris learned of the murder of Linda Craig. Yarris told Delaware County Criminal Investigators, Randolph Martin and David Pfeifer he had information about the Craig murder. He told the investigators a fellow addict, who died from a drug overdose, admitted to raping and murdering Craig. Yarris was wrong and it was the addict’s brother who had died from an overdose. When Martin and Pfeifer determined the addict was alive, they returned Yarris to solitary confinement and told him he better come up with a better story, or they would think he had done it.
After a failed suicide attempt and a brief hospital stay, Yarris was returned to solitary confinement. He was placed in a cell with a broken window, without clothes, or a blanket. In order to get out of his freezing cell, Yarris offered to tell the investigators more about the murder. He spoke with prison guard Gerald Murphy. According to Murphy, Yarris admitted to raping Craig but said another man murdered her. Yarris was charged with the second-degree murder, rape, kidnapping, and robbery of Linda Craig.
Before proceeding to trial for the Craig murder, Yarris was tried for the attempted murder of a police officer, the crime for which he was originally incarcerated. The jury found Yarris not guilty. After the verdict, Barry Gross, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, yelled and spat at Yarris, telling him he would never leave the county alive.
On June 24, 1982, Yarris’s trial for the murder of Linda Craig began. At jury selection, Barry Gross replaced Assistant District Attorney William Ryan. Gross sought the death penalty.
At trial, Defendants introduced a picture of the victim’s car which showed a pair of men’s leather gloves. Unbeknownst to Yarris, the gloves in the picture belonged to the killer. The Defendants never informed Yarris the gloves existed and made no record of the killer’s gloves found in the victim’s car. Yarris claims Defendants concealed the gloves in a separate file and destroyed all records relating to them when they realized the gloves were too small to fit Yarris. A jail-house informant also testified against Yarris at trial. The informant, who was incarcerated for burglarizing District Attorney Ryan’s house, testified Yarris confessed his guilt while the two served in the Delaware County Prison. Yarris claims the informant received a reduced sentence and was allowed visits with his wife in exchange for this testimony.
Yarris was found guilty and sentenced to death. Yarris appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court citing withholding and destruction of evidence. His conviction was affirmed in October 1988.
In March of 1988, Yarris requested testing of the physical evidence by newly developed DNA techniques. The District Attorney’s Office informed him that all evidence had been destroyed except two stained slides. The slides were found of insufficient quantity for DNA testing. Yarris reviewed the trial transcripts and discovered two additional slides of physical evidence, held by National Medical Associates. Assistant District Attorney McAndrews dispatched investigators Pfeifer and Davidson (deceased) to retrieve the evidence. The investigators obtained the evidence, but rather than turn it over for testing they kept it in a paper bag under their desks. The evidence was not in a controlled environment and so it spoiled, rendering it useless for DNA testing.
Yarris continued to look for additional physical evidence for DNA testing, despite being told all other evidence had been destroyed. Ultimately clothing and other evidence found at the scene of the crime, including the killer’s gloves, were discovered misfiled. Yarris asked for an enhanced form of DNA testing on the newly discovered physical evidence to be conducted by the founder of the method. The District Attorney’s Office agreed to the testing, but only if it was conducted by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, a facility that was not recognized as competent in the enhanced testing method. The physical evidence was tested and the test results were again inconclusive.
On January 10, 1997, Yarris filed a PCRA petition. The PCRA court denied the petition on the merits on June 19, 1998. On May 21, 1999, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, sua sponte, held Yarris’s petition was time-barred. Yarris filed a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in October 1999, which considered the exhaustion of state claims and agreed to review Yarris’s habeas claims. Yarris v. Horn, 230 F. Supp. 2d 577, 582 (E.D. Pa. 2002).
Issue
Decision
Rule 12(b)(6) motions test the legal sufficiency of a complaint, and when considering a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12b(6), the court must accept all well-pleaded allegations in the complaint as true and view them in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. The court may not dismiss the complaint unless the plaintiffs can prove no set of facts that would entitle them to relief.
Prosecutors are subject to varying levels of official immunity, with absolute immunity granted when their actions are performed in a quasi-judicial role. This immunity is limited to the prosecutor’s role as an advocate. Government officials performing discretionary functions are generally entitled to qualified immunity.
Yarris claims that Assistant District Attorney Defendants Gross, Ryan, and McAndrews are not entitled to absolute prosecutorial immunity because they acted in an investigatory or administrative manner when they participated in and oversaw the criminal investigation of the crime. Yarris alleges that the Defendants used torture and physical coercion to extract incriminating statements, obtained a false statement from a jailhouse informant, failed to preserve exculpatory evidence, expunged and purposefully concealed a pair of black gloves found at the scene of the crime, and allowed DNA evidence to be mishandled. If Yarris’s claims are true, the Defendants knew their conduct violated Yarris’s constitutional rights and were not entitled to qualified immunity.
Accordingly, the court entered an Order on January 21, 2005, dismissing Plaintiff’s Fifth Amendment claim as to all Defendants, dismissing Plaintiff’s claims against Clifton Minsall, and denying Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss about all other matters.