In December 1986, prosecutors in Pinellas County, Fla., had an issue. That they had simply did not safe a loss of life sentence in opposition to Jack Pearcy within the 1985 killing of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio.
The evening earlier than her nude physique was discovered with 31 stab wounds, floating within the Intracoastal Waterway, Shelly had frolicked ingesting alcohol and smoking marijuana with Pearcy, his girlfriend and his two male roommates. Pearcy, a 31-year-old with an in depth historical past of violence in opposition to ladies, who had pursued Shelly within the months earlier than her loss of life, finally gave a convoluted and contradictory confession that laid many of the blame on one in all his roommates.
Although jurors discovered Pearcy responsible of first-degree homicide, they really useful a life sentence quite than the loss of life penalty that prosecutors sought — “a monumental blow,” as journalist Pamela Colloff explains in Catch the Satan: A True Story of Homicide, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, her engrossing and damning ebook on the case. Securing loss of life sentences in first-degree homicide instances was the first purpose of prosecutors on the time in Pinellas County, the place the nation’s Reagan-era tough-on-crime ethos discovered its apotheosis. Florida led the nation in loss of life sentences throughout this era. “However even by Florida’s requirements, Pinellas County stood out,” Colloff writes. “Prosecutors sought the loss of life penalty in almost each first-degree homicide case that got here earlier than the state legal professional’s workplace.”
However the state had one other likelihood to safe a loss of life penalty — in opposition to Pearcy’s roommate, 40-year-old James Dailey. A Vietnam Struggle veteran who struggled with alcoholism, Dailey had no connection to Shelly, and he maintained his innocence. Investigators had no bodily proof to tie him to the case, solely Pearcy’s self-serving statements. So lead detective John Halliday turned to a tactic the state had used repeatedly: discovering a jailhouse witness who would testify that Dailey had confessed to them.
Fortunately for Halliday, Colloff writes, a snitch he had labored with to assist safe loss of life sentences previously was freshly again in Pinellas County Jail: Paul Skalnik, a con man who “had grow to be one of the crucial prolific, and only, jailhouse witnesses in American historical past.” Over a number of years, Skalnik had been out and in of the jail on repeated felony grand theft expenses and had testified in opposition to or supplied details about 27 inmates.
As Colloff compellingly particulars all through Catch the Satan, prosecutors in Florida had discovered Skalnik and the unlikely tales he advised about fellow inmates unburdening themselves to him “helpful.” “He was the state’s nearer, the witness whose phrases moved jurors to decide on loss of life,” she writes. “The place there was room for doubt, Skalnik erased it.” In alternate, although Skalnik and the state all the time denied it, he obtained extraordinary leniency at sentencing and parole hearings, permitting him to keep away from prolonged jail stays — and to reoffend, Colloff writes. Skalnik as soon as once more cooked up a narrative, the ebook explains, that will work to the state’s profit, claiming that as he handed by Dailey’s cell, Dailey confessed in florid phrases.
“A prosecutor’s determination to lean on a jailhouse witness is normally a pink flag, a tacit admission that the state’s proof is wobblier than it needs to be,” Colloff asserts. But in Dailey’s case, it was Skalnik’s testimony that secured not solely a verdict of guilt for first-degree homicide, however the loss of life sentence prosecutors coveted. And as Dailey has spent almost 40 years on loss of life row, Skalnik’s testimony has continued to function an obstacle to his appeals. “As soon as a witness like Skalnik takes the stand and offers his testimony, it’s nearly unimaginable to unring the bell,” Colloff explains. That is due to the machinations of our authorized system: “within the eyes of the courts, testimony given underneath oath and challenged by means of cross-examination is presumed to have been correctly scrutinized, so it carries extra weight — whether or not or not the method truly reveals the reality.”
In Catch the Satan, Colloff’s cinematic telling of this appalling case serves to focus on the possibly deadly penalties of a legal authorized system that’s extra involved with securing convictions than figuring out the reality and delivering justice. Dailey is way from the one individual claiming to be harmless to have been despatched to loss of life row on the idea of a jailhouse witness’ phrase. Colloff highlights a 2024 report from the Nationwide Registry of Exonerations that discovered that one-quarter of the 142 individuals exonerated in loss of life penalty instances had been sentenced with the assistance of an incarcerated informant.
It’s this illumination of the systemic points that underlie Dailey’s plight— and Skalnik’s deceptions — that units Catch the Satan aside. Whereas that is Colloff’s first ebook, she has spent a long time reporting on the legal justice system, first as a workers author at Texas Month-to-month and extra lately in a joint function as senior reporter at ProPublica and workers author at The New York Instances Journal, which co-publish her investigative options. These options, which mix meticulous reporting and riveting storytelling, have proved Colloff unparalleled at demonstrating the tragic prices of flaws within the legal authorized system.
Catch the Satan grew out of the writer’s 2019 ProPublica-Instances characteristic “False Witness,” which gained a Nationwide Journal Award, amongst different honors. Whereas “False Witness” begins with Skalnik’s function within the Boggio case, Shelly’s homicide would not seem till 1 / 4 of the best way by means of the ebook. As a substitute, Colloff proceeds chronologically from Skalnik’s first stint as a jailhouse witness, within the spring of 1978, when he was locked up in Houston on misdemeanor theft expenses for passing unhealthy checks. Extensively tracing Skalnik’s cons each out and in of jail permits Colloff to amply reveal the pernicious sample investigators and prosecutors in Texas and Florida perpetuated for years earlier than he despatched Dailey to loss of life row. Repeatedly, representatives of the state determined that Skalnik’s crimes — which might come to incorporate the sexual assault of minors — mattered lower than securing convictions within the squishy instances they concocted in opposition to alleged perpetrators of violent crimes.
Towards the tip of the ebook, Colloff underlines how Skalnik was solely capable of inflict such hurt due to highly effective accomplices. “What made him so harmful was not his intelligence or crafty, however quite how readily the establishments that had been alleged to uphold the legislation and shield probably the most susceptible had amplified his lies,” she writes. “These establishments indulged his pathologies, granting him energy and affect he might by no means have achieved on his personal, successfully giving him license to commit nice crimes. With out them, Skalnik would have been nothing greater than a small-time con man.” It is a searing indictment that should spur long-needed reforms to the legal authorized system’s use of jailhouse snitches — and, maybe, lastly free James Dailey.
