LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Journalist Pamela Colloff has long been fascinated by the role of jailhouse snitches in wrongful capital convictions.
PAMELA COLLOFF: The National Registry of Exonerations has logged that 25% of death penalty exonerations had a jailhouse informant whose testimony contributed to that wrongful conviction.
FADEL: These informants are also accused of crimes, so they trade alleged confessions from other accused people in jail to get leniency or to get out from under the charges against them. So when Colloff, who's covered wrongful convictions for decades, got an email about a man on death row in Florida named James Dailey, she almost didn't take it up.
COLLOFF: But there was a throwaway line at the end of her email about how the star witness in her client's case had been a former police officer, turned career con artist, turned jailhouse snitch. And that caught my attention.
FADEL: That man was Paul Skalnik. And her book "Catch The Devil" tells Skalnik's story and the story of Dailey, who is still sitting on death row in Florida.
COLLOFF: Nobody, until I encountered Paul Skalnik, had the sort of outrageous type of story that I thought readers would find really engaging.
FADEL: Now he's the central witness in James Dailey's death row case. Tell us about your many interviews with Paul Skalnik.
COLLOFF: I hoped that with his cooperation, I could tell the real inside story of how he had done this both in Jim Dailey's case and in upwards of 40 different cases. I went to see him in federal prison in Dallas in 2018. And he told me everything that I wanted to hear, and I was elated by this. And so he strung me along enough before I realized, oh. He's not going to tell me anything.
FADEL: Wow.
COLLOFF: And I'm going to have to piece this together myself.
FADEL: Tell me about James Dailey.
COLLOFF: He came of age in the '50s and '60s. He went to Vietnam, and he arrived at the height of the Tet Offensive in 1968. That broke open something in him that really could never be put back together. So he descended into quite severe alcoholism and fell in with a group of people. One of them was a man named Jack Pearcy who ultimately was connected to this crime that Jim now sits on death row for.
FADEL: What is the role of Paul Skalnik in his case?
COLLOFF: Both Jack Pearcy and Jim Dailey were arrested for the murder of a 14-year-old girl in 1985. And all available evidence points to Jack Pearcy, but he pinned this on Jim Dailey. The only eyewitness, quote-unquote, to Jim committing this crime was Jack Pearcy, who was the lead suspect in the case. And so after Jack Pearcy got a life sentence rather than death, Jim was up next. Investigators went to great lengths to find a snitch to testify against Jim. And that's where Skalnik stepped in and then delivered this incendiary testimony on the stand.
FADEL: Now, you report out what seems to conclude that there is a real possibility he had nothing to do with this crime.
COLLOFF: That's correct.
FADEL: What does his case say about the larger criminal justice system?
COLLOFF: What you see in Jim's case is that the system is designed, unfortunately, to compound error. They don't look forward necessarily at new evidence or scientific innovations with forensic science or things like that. The jury verdict is sacrosanct, and there are important reasons for that. But it means that once someone like Paul Skalnik gives sworn testimony that a prosecutor has sponsored and has said is credible and a jury has heard it and has rendered a verdict, it is almost impossible to undo that testimony. There's a conviction on the books, but is it the right conviction?
FADEL: Does he have a death warrant right now?
COLLOFF: He does not. He's 80 years old right now. But I think one thing just to add. Sometimes when prosecutors are so focused on winning a conviction that they forget some of the other people, the collateral damage of that. There are teenage girls who Paul Skalnik abused as his crimes escalated. One in particular was a 12-year-old girl who went to police officers and told them what happened. And that 12-year-old girl's case was swept under the rug, and that was because he had become too valuable of a source to them.
One of the most powerful things that happened while reporting this book was going back and finding those women and telling them that I had found the police reports, that I believed them, that there were witness statements in here that these were prosecutable cases. And that meant so much to them.
FADEL: You spent years reporting this out meticulously, poring over documents, speaking to anybody that you could. And now this book is out in the world. Why was it so important to tell this particular story?
COLLOFF: Jailhouse informants are a feature, not a bug, of our criminal justice system. And what will it take to make people understand that when you have people who are in prison who have the implicit understanding, even if it's never said by an investigator or a prosecutor, that if they give helpful testimony at trial that they could get a sentence reduction or even freedom, this is what we call incentivized testimony? How is it possible that that is testimony that prosecutors are putting on the stand and making look credible, especially, we know, in death penalty cases?
FADEL: Pamela Colloff is a reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She is the author of "Catch The Devil: A True Story Of Murder, Deception, And Injustice On The Gulf Coast." Thank you so much and congratulations on your book.
COLLOFF: Thank you so much for having me.
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FADEL: Paul Skalnik died in a Texas nursing home in 2020.
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