After serving 10 years of a 292-year sentence for nonviolent offenses, an Arizona man has been released from prison.
Atdom Patsalis, who was recently granted clemency and sentenced to home arrest , was greeted by family and supporters as he walked out of a community reentry building in Phoenix Thursday morning.
He said it felt surreal to finally be free.
“I had absolutely accepted the fact that I would spend the rest of my life in prison,” Patsalis said. “So this feels like a dream.”
In 2015, Patsalis was convicted on 25 felony counts stemming from a string of residential burglaries in Bullhead City over three months in late 2013 and early 2014. He was in his early 20s at the time, homeless and struggling with drug addiction.
The judge ordered all convictions to run consecutively, turning a series of lesser sentences into a life sentence.
Patsalis spent years appealing the convictions but was ultimately unsuccessful. With the help of the Arizona Justice Project, a Phoenix-based nonprofit that advocates for the innocent and wrongly convicted, Patsalis recently secured a shortening of his sentence through the clemency process.