According to a 2024 report by the National Registry of Exonerations, of the 142 people on its registry freed from death row, 25% were condemned after the testimony of a jailhouse witness. Catch the Devil is ProPublica and New York Times Magazine journalist Pamela Colloff's measured but disturbing account of the outsized role one man played in the Florida court system to send at least 27 defendants to prison, including four to death row, through a series of fabricated confessions.
Colloff recounts the sordid story of Paul Skalnik, a serial con man, pedophile, and bigamist who displayed a preternatural talent for obtaining confessions from fellow inmates and parlayed his usefulness as a witness at their trials into bargaining chips to win favorable treatment for himself. Skalnik began his career as a snitch in his native Texas in the 1970s, but he wreaked most of his damage aiding prosecutors in Pinellas County, Fla., home to the cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater.
Colloff focuses on Skalnik's role in the case of James Dailey and the decades-long fight to spare him from execution. Dailey, who served three tours of duty in Vietnam, returned from the war bearing severe emotional trauma and turned to alcohol and drugs. He moved to Pinellas County after his divorce, and in 1986, along with his friend Jack Pearcy, was charged in the savage stabbing death of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio.
With no physical evidence linking Dailey to Boggio's murder, and only the dubious testimony of his co-defendant to establish his involvement in the crime, prosecutors turned to Skalnik, who already had a strong track record as an informant. They arranged to move Dailey to Skalnik's cell block, and their star witness soon miraculously related a "brief but lurid account" of the crime he claimed came from Dailey's mouth. Five days after the trial ended in a conviction, Skalnik was a free man.
While Colloff stops short of establishing outright corruption in the prosecutors' repeated willingness to turn to Skalnik to buttress their cases, she makes it clear that their reliance on his highly polished testimony was questionable at best. "What made him so dangerous," she argues, "was not his intelligence or cunning, but rather how readily the institutions that were supposed to uphold the law and protect the most vulnerable had amplified his lies."
Catch the Devil is a sobering glimpse inside a criminal justice system bent on securing convictions at any cost. This troubling work is animated by a spirit similar to Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy and David Dow's The Autobiography of an Execution, exposing inequities in the U.S. system of capital punishment. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Pamela Colloff paints a disturbing portrait of fabulist Paul Skalnik and the role his manufactured confessions played in sending nearly 30 defendants to prison, four of them sentenced to death.