by Sid Holt
Ten days before his grand-theft case went to trial in August 1981, Skalnik provided the state attorney’s office with information on three different defendants who were charged with murder but whose cases had not yet gone to trial. In return, prosecutors offered him a deal. If he pleaded guilty, they would recommend that he spend no more than three years in prison—two fewer than he was facing. They also left open the possibility that he could secure a sweeter deal if he cooperated further. (“Probation was discussed!” states a handwritten note in the state attorney’s files.) Skalnik took the plea, and his sentencing was postponed while he quietly went to work as a jailhouse informant. Prosecutors would hold off on making a sentencing recommendation until they saw exactly how much Skalnik had to offer and how helpful he could be to them. In the meantime, he would remain in jail, a snitch.
Skalnik made himself busy that fall and winter and into the following June, testifying for the state in two drug-trafficking trials and providing a damaging deposition in a high-profile murder case. In each case, Skalnik could truthfully say under oath that he had not been promised anything in return for his testimony because no specific agreements had yet been struck. The narratives he told were strikingly similar, featuring inmates who not only freely admitted their guilt but also did so spontaneously in the same oddly stilted language. In a drug-trafficking case that ended in a guilty verdict, Skalnik testified that the defendant had struck up a conversation with him—midway through the accused’s trial, no less—that began with the declaration, “We were loading the boat with 24,000 pounds of marijuana in Colombia.”
Skalnik was rewarded on June 30, 1982, when, with the backing of the state attorney’s office, he was sentenced to probation. For someone who had racked up five criminal charges in nearly as many years and left the state the last time he was on probation, it was an astonishing feat.
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Buried deep in thousands of pages of court records spread across two states lies evidence to suggest that Skalnik was one of the most prolific, and most effective, jailhouse informants in American history. “I have placed 34 individuals in prison, including four on death row,” he boasted in a 1984 letter to Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida, in a request for favorable treatment—a number that, while inflated at the time, would ultimately prove accurate. During a single six-year span, from 1981 to 1987, Skalnik testified or supplied information in at least thirty-seven cases in Pinellas County alone. Many were cases in which people faced the most serious possible charges and the most severe penalties. Eighteen defendants whose cases Skalnik provided information on were under indictment for murder. A vast majority of their cases ended in convictions or plea deals. Four were sentenced to death.
The state attorney’s office in Clearwater, in an e-mailed statement, said Skalnik independently got fellow inmates to confide in him, then contacted prosecutors or the Pinellas County sheriff’s office. “He at no time was an ‘agent’ of the sheriff’s office or the state attorney’s office,” it said. “The state attorney’s office never provided any leniency to Paul Skalnik in exchange for his testimony.” All information provided by Skalnik, the statement said, was independently verified, and the office has never received any information to indicate that his testimony was “incorrect.”
Still, Skalnik’s journey through the criminal-justice system affords a rare opportunity to see exactly how prosecutors and jailhouse informants work together. These insights are possible because of a rare confluence of forces, including Skalnik’s extensive history of informing and Florida’s strong public-record laws, which enabled ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine to obtain thousands of pages of police reports, arrest records, jail logs, probation and parole records, pretrial interviews, and correspondence that document his activity in sometimes granular detail. This reporting follows decades of litigation waged by public defenders and pro bono attorneys representing death-row inmates in whose cases Skalnik played a role. The full record provides a vivid picture of how jailhouse informants are used, showing which benefits Skalnik was afforded, which crimes he eluded punishment for, and, most clearly, how the state attorney’s office put this witness, who was dubbed “a con man extraordinaire,” in the words of one warrant for his arrest, on the stand in cases where defendants’ lives hung in the balance.
In response to detailed questions about the Dailey trial, Beverly Andrews (now Beverly Andringa), who prosecuted the case, said in an e-mail that she has “very little memory” of the more-than-thirty-year-old case, but she said that she “never willfully and intentionally provided false evidence or testimony to a court or jury on any case.” Robert Heyman, a prosecutor who tried the case with her, pointed out that Skalnik had been vetted by law enforcement and called to testify by other prosecutors. “If we did not believe that his testimony was truthful, we wouldn’t have had him testify,” Heyman said.
Yet again and again, prosecutors have shown that they are willing to rely on the testimony of witnesses like Skalnik, even in cases in which the death penalty is in play. “Jailhouse informants are common in prosecutions of very serious crimes, including ones that carry life and even death sentences,” said Michelle Feldman, the Innocence Project’s state campaigns director, whose work focuses on legislative efforts to regulate the use of jailhouse informants. “Since the courts don’t track them, it’s hard to say which jurisdictions use them the most or how often they testify. But they remain an entrenched feature of criminal prosecutions, even though they are the most unreliable kind of witnesses.”
What makes them so unreliable, she emphasized, is the widespread understanding in jail that prosecutors can offer substantial benefits in exchange for cooperation—rewards that may include not just reduced sentences or improved jail conditions but cash payments. “There is a very strong incentive to lie and very little disincentive not to,” Feldman said.
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The consequences of snitch testimony can be catastrophic. Of the 367 DNA exonerations in the United States to date, jailhouse informants played a role in nearly one in five of the underlying wrongful convictions. A seminal 2004 study conducted by Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions found that testimony from jailhouse snitches and other criminal informants was the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases. Today nearly a quarter of death-row exonerations—22 percent—stem from cases in which prosecutors relied on a jailhouse informant.
Informants often end up on the stand when other evidence is weak; a case that is based on rigorous forensic work or witness testimony that can be independently corroborated does not need a snitch to paper over the gaps. The most unreliable witnesses, then, may testify in the least sound cases—and in cases in which the stakes are the highest.
Given how opaque and unchecked prosecutors’ use of jailhouse informants is, it is impossible to quantify how often they factor into criminal cases. Usually the only glimpse of the government’s reliance on them comes when a scandal erupts, as it did in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, after a serial snitch named Leslie Vernon White went public. In an interview for 60 Minutes, he demonstrated how easy it was to manufacture a confession, procuring key details of a murder on camera in the course of just a few phone calls. His claims led to a grand-jury investigation into jailhouse informants that was the first of its kind. The inquiry exposed extensive prosecutorial misconduct and the widespread misuse of jailhouse informants, who had concocted persuasive-sounding confessions in a variety of ingenious ways. Some impersonated law-enforcement officers to make calls eliciting information; others sent friends and relatives to court hearings to suss out other defendants’ cases. Many were fed information by law enforcement, who shared arrest reports, photos, and case files with inmates, even escorting them to crime scenes so they could better shape their testimony to fit the evidence. The grand jury identified upward of 150 cases, and perhaps as many as 250, that were affected.
In the wake of the scandal, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office instituted
reforms to provide more oversight of prosecutors who put jailhouse informants on the stand, but beyond Los Angeles, little changed. The Chicago Tribune raised the alarm in 1999, when it highlighted prosecutors’ overreliance on jailhouse informants in death-penalty cases in Illinois and found that such testimony had helped convict or condemn four of the state’s twelve death-row exonerees. In the aftermath of the report, which identified numerous problems with the death penalty in Illinois, Gov. George Ryan declared a statewide moratorium on executions, but nationally, the harms of jailhouse informants went unaddressed.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the accrual of DNA exonerations—made possible by the advent of a then-new and revelatory technology—laid bare the fact that snitch testimony had contributed to wrongful convictions across the country. Nevertheless, the authors of the 2004 Northwestern Law study were fatalistic, writing, “The reality is that neither legislatures nor courts are about to ban snitch testimony in the prevailing tough-on-crime political climate.”
In 2014, a quarter century after the Los Angeles snitch scandal began, another scandal broke in neighboring Orange County. A local public defender was able to show that for years, sheriff’s deputies had engaged in a practice of strategically planting informants in the cells of defendants who were awaiting trial. Inmates who produced incriminating information—including “confessions” they elicited with threats of violence—were rewarded with money and sentence reductions.
Orange County’s top prosecutors and law-enforcement officials were implicated, and according to a pending ACLU lawsuit against the county’s district attorney’s office and sheriff’s department, at least 140 cases were tainted. Though no law-enforcement officials were fired or disciplined, the scandal contributed to voters’ ouster of Orange County’s longtime district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, and convictions in dozens of cases were subsequently challenged.
Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is the nation’s foremost legal scholar on criminal informants, said the parallels between the two California scandals show how little has changed in thirty years and how little we know about how often jailhouse informants continue to be used across the country. “In Orange County, a sophisticated jailhouse-informant system remained under the radar, not disclosed in court cases for decades,” Natapoff said. “The accident is that we know about it, not that it happened.”
The benefits jailhouse informants receive, she added, are rarely apparent to jurors, because prosecutors often bestow them on the back end, after a trial’s conclusion. “Many jailhouse informants can truthfully state to the jury that they have not been promised any benefit, even though realistically they expect to be compensated for their testimony,” Natapoff said. “Ironically, jurors will often be the only people in the courtroom who do not understand this arrangement.”
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Karen Parker was twelve when she crossed paths with Skalnik. “He appeared out of nowhere,” she told me. “He befriended my mom and dad, and suddenly he was in our life.” It was July 1982, the middle of a long and restive summer, and Parker usually passed the time at the beach or riding her bike around her working-class neighborhood in Seminole, south of Clearwater. Skalnik—who had found work with her next-door neighbor’s brother, a private investigator—was often around, holding her father rapt with stories of his days as a police officer. He struck Parker as impossibly cool, a sharp dresser with a certain louche charm. “He was magnetic, out of the ordinary—not like other people I knew,” she said. “And he was very attentive to me. He’d give me that extra look, and I had the sense that he was interested. I was drawn in.” She was thirsty for male approval; at home, where her father was stern and critical, she received none. To Parker, Skalnik’s attention was exhilarating.
One day that July, she went fishing with her next-door neighbors in Largo, and Skalnik joined them for the outing. It was dark when they returned to Seminole, and he summoned her to come sit beside him in the front seat of his silver Cadillac. By then, her neighbors had gone inside. Suddenly he was kissing Parker, his hands slipping under her T-shirt. Then his fingers were inside her. “He took my hand and put it on his penis,” she said. “He had me masturbate him until he ejaculated.” Parker had just finished the seventh grade. Skalnik was thirty-two.
His voice turned cold afterward, she said, when he advised her, obliquely, to keep quiet. “One of these days you’re going to open your mouth too many times,” he said, suggesting that doing so could land her in “JDC”—juvenile detention. “The only one who is going to be in trouble is you.”
Parker spoke to only one person about what had happened, a sixteen-year-old girl who lived next door and glimpsed Skalnik kissing her in the car. But the story eventually leaked out later that year, after Skalnik was arrested for grand theft. Upon learning of the assault, Parker’s parents took her to the sheriff’s office. Skalnik was charged in December 1982 with “lewd and lascivious conduct on a child under fourteen,” a felony punishable by up to fifteen years in prison.
The case against him was a strong one. Parker’s description of the assault was bolstered by the eyewitness account from the sixteen-year-old neighbor she confided in and another from the sixteen-year-old’s boyfriend, who, as he approached the car, saw “movement in the suspect’s lap (suspect’s hand or victim’s) of a masturbatory nature,” according to the police report. And unlike some victims of child sexual abuse, Parker was old enough to clearly articulate what happened to her and was willing to testify. “I don’t think it is right that he is calling me a liar and I am not,” she told investigators. There were also the results of a polygraph examination that the sheriff’s office administered to Parker. (“Have you ever heard of a twelve-year-old girl having to take a polygraph?” she asked me, still incredulous.) Polygraphs have since been shown to be unreliable and are not generally admissible in court, but they were central to many law-enforcement agencies’ investigations in the 1980s; the fact that Parker passed, and that her account of the assault was found to be truthful, was meaningful at the time. All told, prosecutors had a case they could take to trial. Child sexual-assault cases are routinely prosecuted on far less.
But the state attorney’s office would ultimately decline to try Skalnik. In a plea hearing that took place on March 10, 1983, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the molestation charge. In return, Skalnik pleaded no contest to new charges of grand theft, for which he had been arrested the previous November. (True to form, Skalnik had tricked a woman into giving him nearly $5,000 on the promise of starting a travel agency together and defrauded a couple out of more than $20,000 by assuring them that he could deliver discounted cars that were forfeited to the state in narcotics cases—all of which violated his probation in the previous grand-theft case involving his fiancée.) These charges carried much lighter punishments than child molestation. The state attorney’s notice to the court dismissing the lewd-and-lascivious conduct charge said simply, “There is insufficient evidence available at this time.”
Skalnik took the plea deal, for which he received concurrent five-year sentences. But instead of being sent to state prison to serve out his punishment, he would remain in the Pinellas County Jail, where he could continue to work as a jailhouse informant, gathering information on defendants who had not yet gone to trial. (Prosecutors argued that keeping him in the county jail was for his safety, given that his testimony had helped send men to prison.) And with the child-molestation charge out of the way, Skalnik came across to jurors as a far more innocuous figure than he actually was—that is, as a former police officer turned small-time scam artist, rather than as a child molester.
Parker belongs to a group of crime victims who remain forgotten in a criminal-justice system that allows jailhouse informants to be released and to continue committing crimes because prosecutors exchanged leniency for their testimony. Parker never knew about prosecutors’ deal with Skalnik, only that he was never punished for what he did to her. “No one ever said, ‘That’s wro
ng,’ ” she told me. “The message I got was that what he did was OK—that it wasn’t serious, it wasn’t a crime.” In her father’s eyes, she said, it was she who was to blame for what happened. “Everyone liked Paul, and they believed Paul, and I was seen as the troublemaker,” she said. After Skalnik’s arrest, her father’s harsh criticism of her escalated, until it became unbearable. Parker ran away the following year, when she was thirteen, and left home for good when she was fourteen, taking refuge at a runaway shelter. “I didn’t trust anyone for a long, long time,” she said.
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Skalnik, meanwhile, continued to be valuable to the state attorney’s office after his molestation charge was dismissed in 1983. That year and the next, he testified in four high-profile murder trials, three of which ended with death sentences. All three of the men who were condemned to die—Richard Cooper, Kenneth Gardner and J. D. Walton—had, without question, been present at the scenes of the horrendous crimes they stood accused of. But because several people were charged in connection to each murder, the key question at Cooper’s, Gardner’s, and Walton’s trials was one of culpability: How much of a role did the accused play, and were his actions egregious enough to warrant the electric chair? Prosecutors used Skalnik to show that each man was not just guilty but also deserved death.
At the time, in the 1980s, appearing soft on crime was a surefire way to be voted out of office. “In Florida, prosecutors, judges, the attorney general, the governor—everyone wanted to prove how tough they were,” Stephen Bright told me. Bright, one of the nation’s preeminent capital defense attorneys and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, went to Clearwater in 1985 to challenge the conviction and death sentence of a man who was bound for the electric chair. Gov. Bob Graham of Florida, who earned the nickname Governor Jell-O because he was seen as weak and ineffective, reinvented himself by signing death warrants, increasing the number of warrants he signed when he ran for reelection in 1982, and again when he ran for Senate in 1986. “In Florida,” Bright added, “it seemed like there couldn’t be enough death sentences.”