“Mr. Nicholas is a prolific sex offender,” prosecuting attorney Mary Barbosa said in court May 25 in asking for an exceptional sentence. “He killed Sarah Yarborough while he was on parole from attempted rape of another women. … While he has no other convictions since 1994, the damage he is capable of inflicting is obvious and the risk to the public is too great to assume he is safe.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
But the 548-month sentence imposed on Nicholas was not sought out of vengeance, she said. Instead, Barbosa said, the sentence should reflect the severity of the crime as well as recognize his previous victims, and the many years he remained free on parole that should have been revoked.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Nicholas was previously convicted of two counts of first-degree rape in King County in 1980, when he was 16, and attempted first-degree rape in Benton County in 1983, according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
That 1983 attempted rape earned Nicholas a 10-year sentence. He earned parole and served less than half that time. Had he served the full sentence, he would not have been released from prison until after Sarah had graduated high school. And had he been caught soon after killing Sarah, his parole would have been revoked, causing him to serve the rest of that sentence, prosecutors pointed out.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The victim of that attempted rape, Anne Croney, gave an impact statement during sentencing and agreed to be named. She recalled fleeing into the Columbia River, only 21 years old, after then-19-year-old Nicholas had put a knife to her throat, ordered her to undress and begun marching her down an embankment.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
After learning Nicholas had been convicted and sentenced, she began moving on from the ordeal. But Croney’s life became tied up with the Yarboroughs in 2019, when she learned that the man who’d tried to rape her decades before had been arrested for the murder of 16-year-old Sarah.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“The emotion that keeps coming up the strongest is anger,” Croney said, locking eyes at times with Nicholas as she spoke. “Anger because we rely on a system of justice designed to protect us from predators like Nicholas. And this system failed me, Sarah, her family and friends and countless others.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Defense attorney Montes pointed to Nicholas’ relative youth, especially in his prior convictions, in asking for leniency.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“Mr. Nicholas is a tragic example of how our past failures to deal correctly with youth harm not only the youth but our entire community,” Montes wrote in a presentence report.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
While his criminal offenses “were incredibly impulsive and serious,” Montes wrote, they ceased after the age of thirty — indicating, Montes argued, that his criminal history had more to do with the impulsive and reckless behavior typical of an adolescent mind than of a irreparably depraved mind.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“There is only one explanation for this: Mr. Nicholas fits into the taxonomy of people whose offending is limited to youth,” Montes wrote. “Unfortunately, he was prosecuted and punished for his prior alleged youthful offenses during one of the most punitive periods in our history and as a result, did not benefit from rehabilitation that could have changed things before Sarah Yarborough was killed. This tragedy is truly beyond words. Mr. Nicholas, who very clearly was capable of change … had to mature out of offending behavior without guidance, leading to tragic consequences.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
He pointed to an interview with detectives where Nicholas talked about getting nightmares about his past.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“This does not mean that no sanction is appropriate,” Montes wrote. “Obviously such a heinous and senseless crime must have a response. Twenty years is a severe response, especially since this almost certainly represents the rest of Mr. Nicholas’s life.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Wiggs said she took Nicholas’ relative youth during his prior convictions seriously.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“The court has to grapple with that,” she said during court. “Because young people are different.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
But “what I see here is not conduct that was a product of an undeveloped or developing youthfulness,” Wiggs said. “When I consider the history that Mr. Nicholas has, and the facts of this case, it speaks to a not an immature developing brain. It speaks to a calculated, predatory, depraved, brain.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
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