by Sid Holt
Even so, Pinellas County stood out. For a three-year period, from 1982 to 1984, it sent more people to death row than any other county in Florida. At the time, the state attorney’s office was run by a hard-charging prosecutor named James T. Russell, who stood just five-foot-five but enjoyed a fearsome reputation. A perfectionist whose moral universe had no shades of gray, Russell pursued a law-and-order agenda that appealed to his constituents, who were disproportionately older and overwhelmingly white. “Put more criminals in prison, and there will be less crime on the streets,” he told a local civic group in 1981, condemning what he perceived to be a system that placed too much emphasis on rehabilitating people who broke the law. (Russell died in 2006.) Few questioned the bare-knuckled tactics behind his office’s conviction rate, which reached 92 percent in 1990. So fierce was the drive to rack up wins that prosecutors “sought the death penalty in nearly every first-degree murder case,” according to a 1988 survey by a local public defender—a strategy that allowed them to leverage the threat of the electric chair to extract guilty pleas from defendants.
The demand for convictions and long, tough sentences made Skalnik’s testimony invaluable. The confessions he recounted were lurid and dramatic, strewn with provocative details that prosecutors used not just to show the guilt of the defendants but also to establish that they were diabolically evil. Skalnik told of victims’ begging for their lives and of remorseless killers who laughed after their slaughters, boasting that they had outsmarted prosecutors and the police. Gardner, who was convicted in a grisly stabbing death of a hardware-store owner, supposedly bragged to Skalnik, “I killed him, but they’ll never prove it.” Walton, who was found guilty of carrying out the execution of three men after a botched robbery, considered the whole thing “a funny joke,” Skalnik told jurors. And Cooper, one of Walton’s codefendants, supposedly introduced himself to Skalnik with the brash declaration, “I’m one of the men involved in the triple-murder slayings they thought was a mafia gangland killing.”
Though Cooper might have earned the jury’s mercy because he was a teenager, Skalnik turned that potentially mitigating fact on its head by sharing an offhand comment he attributed to Cooper. “He said no jury would ever sentence him to the death chair,” Skalnik testified, “because he’s nineteen years old and because he’s got that little baby face.” The jury recommended that Cooper be put to death. (Gardner and Cooper would eventually be resentenced to life in prison.)
The confessions he claimed these men volunteered to him—and that the state attorney’s office had him repeat to juries—were all the more extraordinary given that he was held in protective custody and that his reputation as a snitch was well known to other men in the jail. “Beginning to encounter more and more inmates who recognize him,” stated a note in his file from January 1983. Nevertheless, Skalnik was sometimes moved closer to, or even into the same cell as, a defendant in a newsworthy case. Cooper was assigned to a two-man cell with Skalnik; Gardner was later assigned to a cell that adjoined Skalnik’s. It was during their brief time in proximity to him that each supposedly came clean. A third inmate, a codefendant of Cooper’s named Terry Van Royal, protested when Skalnik was moved into his cell. “I told the guard I would not be in the same cell with him,” Van Royal later wrote in an affidavit, “because I knew who he was and what he did.”
If defense attorneys tried to suggest that Skalnik’s preternatural ability to extract men’s most closely held secrets was too good to be true, Skalnik would insist that he stood to gain nothing from his testimony, as he did during the 1983 murder trial of Freddie Gaines. A twenty-four-year-old handyman, Gaines was charged with stabbing his girlfriend’s ex-lover to death in a bar brawl—a chance encounter, Gaines told the jury, that turned violent. But Skalnik’s testimony jettisoned any notion that Gaines acted spontaneously; to hear him tell it, Gaines had carried out a calculated, coldblooded murder. Skalnik said Gaines boasted of bringing a knife to the bar and seeking out the victim, telling Skalnik he should have been charged “with open-heart surgery.” Skalnik’s voice swelled with emotion as he spoke, so much that he once appeared to be on the brink of tears.
Gaines told me that he was floored when he heard Skalnik testify and that he leaned over and told his lawyer: “He’s sitting right there telling a lie. Me and this man ain’t never talked before.” But Skalnik’s testimony was effective, recasting a possible crime of passion into a premeditated execution—a distinction that would help earn Gaines a conviction for first-degree murder and a life sentence, rather than a lesser charge like manslaughter, which carried a penalty of up to fifteen years.
Skalnik assured the jury that he had come forward with no other motive than to preserve public safety. “I used to be a police officer,” he said, adding that he became an informant after hearing other men in the jail brag that they were going to beat their charges. Assistant State Attorney Bruce Young bolstered the idea that Skalnik’s intentions were selfless. “It’s your understanding that nothing can be done for you as far as eliminating or reducing your sentence?” Young asked.
“That’s correct,” Skalnik replied.
Young continued, “Even if your lawyer wanted to go in front of a judge, the judge would have no jurisdiction to reduce the sentence, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Skalnik said with a note of resignation. “That’s correct.”
Just three months later, Young wrote to the Florida Department of Corrections to request leniency. “Mr. Skalnik has been a state witness in a number of very important cases, including several first-degree murder cases, and his testimony has been honest and truthful in all cases,” Young said. Expressing concern for Skalnik’s safety, he asked that his star witness not be sent to state prison but remain in the jail; better yet, Young proposed, the State of Florida could simply release him. “If Mr. Skalnik is eligible for parole,” he wrote, “I would urge that Mr. Skalnik be considered for parole.” (Young did not respond to detailed requests for comment.)
One of Skalnik’s most loyal supporters would also go to bat for him. John Halliday—the detective who previously worked with Skalnik and would later receive key information from him in the Dailey case—called the parole board that fall on his behalf. “Mr. Halliday would like the commission to know the subject has been of great assistance to the sheriff’s office,” reads an interoffice memo documenting the call. Halliday wrote directly to a parole commissioner the next month, urging him to consider Skalnik for release. “I have never done this for an inmate during my ten years in law enforcement,” Halliday added.
(Halliday declined to review a detailed request for comment, referring it to Keith Johnson, an investigator for the state attorney’s office. Johnson referred the request to the state attorney’s office, which declined to comment about Halliday, as did a spokeswoman for the Pinellas County sheriff’s office, who noted that the cases in question took place long ago.)
On March 19, 1985, Skalnik was paroled. Having served about half of his five-year sentence for grand theft, he was free, despite assessments from the Department of Corrections that judged him to be a “con artist of the highest degree” who was at “high risk of further unlawful behavior.” Sure enough, after Skalnik was released, he cheated an elderly woman out of tens of thousands of dollars for two Lincoln Town Cars he never delivered; conned another woman out of thousands more with a phony real estate deal; and duped a jewelry-store clerk into taking a check from what turned out to be a defunct bank account for a $6,100 gold Rolex. He also married and divorced his fifth wife.
By November 24, 1986, he was back in the Pinellas County Jail, where he would claim, the following summer, to have procured James Dailey’s confession. “Mr. Skalnik’s deceitful nature knows no bounds,” an unknown person wrote in a handwritten letter to the state attorney’s office, urging prosecutors to punish him as harshly as the law would allow. “How many chances will this man be given? How many more people will he hurt and victimize?”
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sp; As reform-minded prosecutors have swept into office over the past five years in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Boston, some district attorney’s offices have begun to reevaluate the way they have always done business. “People in these communities have made very clear that a win-at-all-costs approach is not what they want anymore and does not make them safer,” said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, a network for progressive prosecutors. In an effort to stem mass incarceration, reformers have focused their energy on trying to address the big, structural problems that most directly affect people’s liberty, like changing the cash-bail system and diverting defendants to drug treatment instead of prison.
So far, the use of jailhouse informants has received relatively little consideration. “It’s an issue that is just starting to gain attention,” Krinsky said. “There is a new dialogue about whether prosecutors should institute safeguards that would allow them to continue using jailhouse informants but proceed with caution, or whether to steer clear of jailhouse informants completely.”
In some state legislatures, the idea of bringing greater scrutiny to jailhouse informants has slowly begun to gain traction. In 2017, Texas lawmakers tried to strip away the secretive nature of snitch deals by compelling prosecutors to keep track of and disclose the sort of rudimentary information that defendants and their lawyers are often lacking. This includes a full accounting of the benefits that jailhouse informants have received for their testimony, their criminal records and the previous cases in which they testified. Last year, Illinois passed legislation that requires judges to hold pretrial “reliability hearings” to evaluate whether informants, in light of the benefits they have been promised and their histories as informants, should be allowed to testify. In July, Connecticut became the first state to enact a statewide tracking system for jailhouse informants that documents where and when such witnesses have previously testified and what benefits they received in return.
Florida took action after a staggering number of its death-row inmates were exonerated; to date, twenty-nine condemned men have been cleared of their convictions, more than in any other state. A commission appointed by the Florida Supreme Court to study wrongful convictions recommended that prosecutors disclose the deals they make with jailhouse informants, and in response, the court changed the rules of criminal procedure in 2014 to require the disclosure of such deals as well as other details related to the informant. The new requirement was intended to introduce transparency—but in practice, it does not address the common problem that prosecutors may not need to make explicit promises at all, because the potential for leniency is implicit and well understood.
Reformers hope that new legislation, though imperfect, could still deter prosecutors from relying on jailhouse informants. “When you put reforms in place that require tracking and disclosing information about these witnesses, what often comes to light is a good deal of information that could discourage prosecutors from wanting to move forward,” says Rebecca Brown, director of policy for the Innocence Project. “Once they have a fuller understanding of all the factors that would underlie that informant’s testimony, they have to confront questions like: Is this reliable enough to move forward with?”
But in a vast majority of states, no reforms have been passed at all. Perjury charges for jailhouse snitches are very rare, even when their testimony is later proved to have been demonstratively false. So, too, are any meaningful consequences for prosecutors who fail to disclose agreements made with a jailhouse informant at the time of trial or who mislead juries into thinking that an informant will not receive rewards after testifying or who conceal facts about a jailhouse informant’s criminal history that might undermine his credibility. No legislation has yet addressed the outsize but largely invisible role that jailhouse informants play in plea deals, in which prosecutors may use the mere specter of an informant’s future testimony to intimidate defendants into not taking their cases to trial. And more radical ideas—like an outright ban on jailhouse informants in capital cases—have stalled, allowing prosecutors to continue using snitch testimony to secure the starkest, most irrevocable punishment.
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On August 7, 1987, five weeks after James Dailey’s trial ended in a guilty verdict, the forty-one-year-old Vietnam veteran came to court to be formally sentenced to death. He had remained mute throughout his trial, but that day, he finally rose to speak. Tall and angular, with dark hair and a long, mournful face, he began by recognizing the “terrible kind of pain” Shelly Boggio’s murder had caused her twin sister, and the anguish felt by her family members, who sat in the courtroom, weeping. “I say these things as a caring human being and as a person wrongfully convicted of this heinous crime,” he declared. He had been condemned by Pinellas County’s “win at all costs” system of justice, he said, in which “truth is allowed to be manipulated and paid liars are allowed to testify.” His trial, he added before he was led away in shackles, had been a “mockery of justice.”
Skalnik, who was released five days later, was supposed to be back in court that October for his trial on charges of grand theft. But by the time his trial date rolled around, he had skipped town, having absconded with a rented Lincoln Town Car shortly before he was due to marry a woman who believed he worked undercover for the FBI. Prosecutors were left in the lurch; their star witness, who was slated to testify in three coming murder trials, was suddenly a fugitive from justice.
Skalnik, meanwhile, was hiding out in Austin, Texas, where he was busy practicing a sort of absurdist performance art. Passing himself off as “J. Paul Bourne,” a high roller who was flush with oil money, he managed to buy $27,000 worth of jewelry with forged checks while also running “a new unknown type scam,” according to documents from the Travis County district attorney’s office—a con that involved opening bank accounts on the promise that millions of dollars would be wired in. He also married, and soon divorced, his sixth wife.
Following his arrest on a forgery charge in February 1988, he tried to reprise his role as a snitch, but an assistant district attorney in Austin saw what should have been clear to any prosecutor. Skalnik, she warned in an interoffice memo, “is a BIG con artist.” Skalnik was soon extradited back to Florida, where he was booked, once again, into the Pinellas County Jail.
By then, his relationship with the state attorney’s office had soured, his decision to bolt to Texas having made a farce of the trust it had put in him. But if prosecutors thought they could distance themselves from Skalnik, they had failed to discern the game he was playing. When they balked at his demands for a lenient plea deal in the summer of 1988, he turned on them.
With the help of his public defender, Skalnik filed a motion with the trial court in which he claimed a history of extensive prosecutorial misconduct. In the motion, he asserted that prosecutors had coached him on how to testify in numerous cases so as to give jurors the false impression that he “had actually heard all these ‘confessions,’ and had no agreement with the state for a reward for his testimony.” Prosecutors “knew of the potential questionability of said confessions,” the motion charged. Skalnik provided the names of eleven prosecutors whom he accused of misconduct but provided few specifics. He claimed to have given information or testimony in more than fifty cases and suggested that much of that evidence was tainted.
Just as the men whom Skalnik leveled outrageous claims against over the years had faced accusations that were maddeningly difficult to disprove, prosecutors found themselves on the defensive, scrambling to discredit what Skalnik claimed was the honest truth. In formal responses submitted to the court, the state attorney’s office categorically denied his assertions, dismissing them as “falsehoods, ranging in degree from gross exaggeration to preposterous fabrication”—a richly paradoxical about-face for an office that had asked scores of jurors to take him at his word. Trying to preserve the integrity of the cases Skalnik had participated in, prosecutors simultaneou
sly argued that his earlier testimony as a state witness “was credible, was often independently substantiated and withstood extensive cross-examination.”
In fact, behind the scenes, an investigator with the state attorney’s office had difficulty verifying that Skalnik had provided information that could be independently corroborated. Of the two examples Detective Halliday provided—he said Skalnik’s tips led law enforcement to a ski mask worn during the committing of a murder and to a gun used in another killing—only the claim about the ski mask checked out; of the other, the investigator wrote: “This information is incorrect. The information from Skalnik was accurate; however it came months after the gun was retrieved.”
Skalnik brought forth his grievances, the state attorney’s office told the court, only after he failed to blackmail prosecutors into cutting him a favorable deal. Yet in the end, Skalnik got exactly what he wanted. After Skalnik withdrew his motion claiming that they had engaged in misconduct, he and prosecutors arrived at what appeared to be a mutually beneficial arrangement—one that would both appease Skalnik and send him far from Pinellas County. For a total of six felonies—four counts of grand theft and two counts of failure to appear in court—he would receive a five-year sentence. He entered his plea on the condition that his sentence be served in Texas, where he had time left on a bail-jumping charge.
Skalnik ended up evading even that relatively meager punishment. In November 1989, after completing seven months in prison in Huntsville, Texas, on the bail-jumping charge, the State of Texas—which never agreed to allow him to serve his Florida sentence there—released him. Ultimately Florida abandoned its efforts to extradite him. “The commission has received information which has caused it to conclude that return of said person is not warranted,” read one notably oblique 1991 Florida Parole Commission memo.