How an innocent man was put on death row

Hello, it's Basha Cummings here and you're listening to the slow newscast from The Observer. There are those rare times when you start reading a book and you begin to will the world to slow down around you, to give you more precious time to keep turning the pages. I was hoping that buses would be stuck in traffic and my train delayed after I began reading Catch the Devil, a new book about an astonishing miscarriage of justice that is still playing out on America's death row today. The book tells the story of how for decades a former police officer turned con artist and jailhouse informant in Florida made a living by telling police and prosecutors that other prisoners had confessed to their crimes. His falsified testimony helped send a man called Jim Daly to death row for the murder of a teenage girl. Nearly 40 years later, Daly is still there, aged 80. He's innocent and he's still trying to clear his name. The writer of the book is Pamela Colloff, one of America's best investigative journalists who set out to understand the story of this jailhouse informant. But what she uncovered was a story not just about deception, but about the many people and institutions that enabled him. It is an extraordinary piece of reporting, engaging, enraging, motivating and as you're here, deeply moving. I spoke to Pamela about the case and the politics of the death penalty, a debate which has taken on new urgency given the botched execution attempt of Christopher Pike, who last week survived two doses of the lethal injection. And then soon after, the suggestion from Pete Hegseth that America's next execution by firing squad could be livestreamed for everyone to see. So Pamela, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about your book. Thank you so much for having me. So let's start at the very beginning. When did you first become aware of a man called Paul Scalmick? I received an email in 2018 from a research scholar at Yale Law School, a woman named Laura Fernandez. And she wrote me an email that is the kind of email I receive sadly all the time, which is that she represented a man who she believed to be innocent. What made the case slightly more unusual is that he was on Florida's death row. And in describing the case to me, at the end of her email sort of as an aside, she mentioned that the star witness against her client in this murder case from 1985 was a man named Paul Scalmick and that he was a former police officer turned con artist, turned jailhouse informant. So this seemed to me once I started digging to be sort of the perfect story in which the informant himself was so narratively fascinating. You know, he was this real catch me if you can style con artist. He'd been married to nine different women and had led this very colorful life. So I went to see him in federal prison in 2018 and just wanted to feel out whether he might speak to me. And he did, in fact, he promised me that he would work with me to tell this story and that turned out to be the first of many lies in my reporting with him. I think that's one of the things that was so sort of unsettling about your book, a book about a con artist, conning various people, the system as much as his victims, was also the act of him conning you as the journalist trying to seek answers. And so you almost set yourself into the narrative from the very beginning that his story is working on you in one way or another in the same way that has worked on others. That's exactly right. I rarely use the first person or insert my self in my stories, but I thought it was important to start the book showing that he tricked me because I didn't want anyone to read this. I think this is pretty common with con artist stories, just sort of have this feeling as they're reading this of, you know, these rubs like I would never fall for the things that this man did when he said to me that he thought this was a really important story to tell and that he was at the point in his life. He was in very poor health that he felt like it was time to tell it. That sounded right to me and I only later realized, you know, his art, and I guess this is the art of any great con artist, is he knew exactly what I wanted to hear. And so even though I'm an investigative journalist, I'm visiting him in federal prison, he knows I'm coming and I'm hungry for something and he feeds that to me. And it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that he was just stringing me along. I went home and wrote him a series of letters and tried to go back to see him and we wrote, I mean, we exchanged scores of letters, but there is never any information in there about what I wanted to know. So he was sort of on the one hand stringing you along, but you were obviously conducting your own investigation and piecing together his story and of course for us here in the UK, the idea of a kind of jail house informant. It just doesn't have the same kind of cultural sense as it does perhaps in the US. So tell me, as you were investigating him, what did you learn about how he was playing the system or playing the criminal justice system in particular? This con was the same, he had the same get out of jail free trick that he did over and over again and what that was is he started off committing very sort of petty crimes, writing a bad check for $50 at the grocery store, things like that and it gradually escalated. But every time he would get caught and he often got caught because he refused to use a pseudonym until very late in his life, he would end up in the local county jail. And in the states in jail, you are awaiting trial typically, you're presumed innocent. This is what we call pretrial detention. So he knew from his time as a cop, he knew exactly what to look for when he was in the jail, who was it, who was there, who police and prosecutors most wanted to get a conviction against. And then he would use things like newspaper articles and other clues to weave together a story of a quote-unquote confession that that person had given him and he would go to police or prosecutors and say, "Hey, this guy confessed to me. Here are all the details I'd be glad to help you out with your case." And in return for his testimony, he was freed over and over again. And that emboldened him. You know, he went from being a petty thief to some quite serious crimes. You trace that journey for about the first half of the book and then it really changes gear and the entire sort of focus of the book shifts where the story really gets it's, I guess, narrative and emotional weight is from focusing on this one particular murder of a teenager called Shelley Bosio and the men accused of killing her and how Paul Scalnek's story came to collide with these men's lives. Tell us that story. Yeah, so in 1985 in Pinellas County, Florida, which is on the Gulf Coast of Florida, a 14-year-old girl named Shelley Bosio was murdered and it was a terrible crime. She was found nude in the water with over 30 stabbing wounds to her body. The assumption was that she had been sexually assaulted. The investigation quickly leads to the person she was last seen with, a man named Jack Pierci. And there were numerous clues that Jack Pierci was the perpetrator of this crime. He had fled the state afterward. He had blood on his shoes, which he talked about to investigators. He had last been seen with her and had pursued her even though he was 29 years old. For a long time before her death. So when investigators finally catch up with him in Kansas, he realizes they know too much about his involvement to claim he knows nothing. So he quickly pivots and tells a story that, yes, he was there when Shelley was murdered, but the person who did it was actually his housemate, this man named Jim Dayley, a Vietnam veteran who had really descended into some bad alcoholism by the time these two men were living together. Jack Pierci, who had this long history of violence against women, he'd been involved in a murder for higher cates before, was a stark contrast to Jim, who didn't have that kind of background. But investigators basically zeroed in on the two of them and they were both charged with Shelley's murder. And because it was the 80s and the tough on crime era, in that area of Florida, it will. really was unthinkable that both these men would not receive the death penalty once they were found guilty in a court of law. What ended up happening was Percy, who by all accounts as the perpetrator and who later confessed and then retracted the confession, he ended up getting life in prison. He was put on trial first and then the pressure was really, really on prosecutors. At that point, the lead investigator in the case went to the county jail, started pulling men out of the jail and asking them what they knew about Jim's case, what Jim had said to them about the murder of Shelley Bogeo. A number of them remember being brought into a room where newspaper articles were laid out about Shelley's murder and the details of her case. The investigator denies that that happened. No one offers up any evidence and a couple weeks before the trial is supposed to begin, Paul Scalnick is moved to the same part of the jail where Jim Daly is and miraculously within 24 hours, these two men who've never spoken to each other, Paul Scalnick comes forward and says that Jim Daly gave him a full confession to the crime. That's really, I suppose, the point in your book and in your investigation where you start to realise that this isn't actually a story about a man who is gaming the system because he's figured out what people want. It's also a system that is using him to its own ends and you write really powerfully about exactly as you've just suggested the sort of the pressure to secure convictions, the pressure to send people to death row, that scene as the kind of ultimate tough on crime outcome and you trace that down to all these small decisions that are being made by police officers and county jail attendants and other people who are kept in the jails. As you were piecing together this portrait of a criminal justice system, what were you feeling as you were starting to see this bigger picture of corruption and manipulation emerge? I'm so glad you asked that question because I think I want people to walk away from this book not feeling that Paul Scalnick is the villain of the book but really that the system and its incentives are what we should be focused on. I think you can see in the book all these small decisions by so many different people that lead to the wrong outcome. There is intense pressure, so in Florida district attorneys and state attorneys are elected. So there's intense pressure to please voters and at that time that quote unquote tough on crime ethos meant winning these really really long sentences. But I think it's those small decisions so it's the detective going to the jail and putting everyone on alert that he needs an informant. It's the prosecutors who have all this pressure on them and also can look to the fact that their mentors and all their colleagues had used Paul Scalnick before. By the time of Jim Daly's trial in 1987, he's been a witness in this county in Florida, Pinellas County for six years on and off. He had been involved in dozens of cases. You tell really tenderly the story of a young man who gets married, goes to Vietnam, is terribly traumatized by his experience there. Comes back, isn't able to kind of readjust look after his children, his wife remarries, but they remain close and familial with each other in the sense that they look out for each other. And he ends up living with this man Jack Pearcee which ends up being just the worst thing possible for him. He's convicted on the basis of Paul Scalnick's. I mean, it's okay to say just totally made up evidence. It's completely fabricated. He's sentenced to death and he's been on death row now for more than 30 years. Yeah, so he arrived on death row in August of 1987 and has been there ever since. And it's important to note that in the present day in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is setting execution dates approximately every 30 days. Florida this year has executed more than all other states in the US combined. So the threat that Jim will have in execution dates set is ever present that has not gone away. To me, it's so incredible that a man who's 80 years old who does not have the criminal record like Jack Pearcee who's served these many decades in prison and who has a real case of innocence that he can prove in court is just stuck because of the way that our system works. Yeah. And just to zoom out one by one layer, of course, this is also being politically bolstered now. Ron DeSantis has obviously made capital punishment a kind of centerpiece of his political life and his political campaigns as has Donald Trump to an extent. And one of the ways in which you sort of enrage the reader in a positive way and in a productive way, but it is enraging is you see how these ripple effects then come down to the people who are actually on death row. So just tell me about how the sort of winds have shifted for Jim daily because of the politics that has changed around him. Yeah. So one of the things that's so fascinating here is how and this is particularly true in Florida is how much politics is intertwined with the death penalty. So in Texas, where I live, which is usually the place that is executing the most people, but Florida has surpassed us. In Texas, execution dates come up through the court system. Your case is slowly making its way through appeals until you run out of appeals and a judge sets a date in Florida. It's a completely different and extremely bizarre in my opinion system where you have, I believe they're 250 men roughly on Florida's death row now about half of them are death warrant eligible. That means they've they've gone through all their appeals and a date can be set. And the only person who has the power to set that date is the governor. And there is zero transparency about how he makes these decisions and why he picks the people he picks. So I wrote a story for the New York Times magazine this summer that was about the arbitrariness of this decision making and the impact this has on both the incarcerated and the prison staff who take care of them because you have men who've been on death row since the 1970s since Gerald Ford was president here who have not been executed, who are leapfrogged by more recent cases when he sets these dates. So imagine first there's the experience of having an execution date looming over you in some way. But the idea that at any day, any moment, year after year, decade after decade, that date could be set. But you never know when it's going to happen. I think is its own sort of cruel and unusual punishment. And I described how the men there, there's a particular series of sounds that they have come to recognize as prison staff coming to announce that there has been what's called a death warrant handed down. And so they can listen to it sounds different because it's a larger group of people walking through the unit. You become hyper aware. And that sound of that group progressing down the row, these men don't know if it's coming for them, if it's coming for someone who they've grown close to. And this goes on every day year after year. So that's what Jim looks with every day. Just in terms of the kind of the US public, is there widespread support for this kind of system for these executions? You know, you sketch out really well how in the 70s and 80s there was. And you know, it was there was great political capital in this system. It feels like there's been a sort of resurgence of that. Is that really the case is a most American's pro execution pro capital punishment? So that has shifted a lot over the years. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, this was a very pro death penalty country. I remember people who question that seeming almost French. That has really shifted over the years. And I think a big reason is the advent of DNA testing, which has shown us over and over and over again that people are wrongfully convicted. And innocent people are even sent to death row. Just as a quick example, Florida holds the record among US states for wrongful death row convictions. There are 30 men who've been exonerated in the past three decades from Florida. That's a lot. And you know, I think you can tell from reading the book how hard it is to get to the point of an exoneration so you can extrapolate from those numbers that there are more. So public thinking has really shifted on this. And I don't have the numbers in front of me. But generally speaking depends on what state you're in. Many, many people are now either opposed to the death penalty or questioning the death penalty. I think what's tricky is with the advent of MAGA politics and this very punishing style of politics of humiliation and domination. The tough on crime message resonates. I'm putting that in quotes, tough on crime. I don't believe it actually is tough on crime. I think it's performative, but that whole thing of projecting strength really comes through, I think, you see in certain states here, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, really generally speaking, Southern states doubling down on the death penalty. I just, I wanted to read a short paragraph that you wrote back to you. I know that's probably uncomfortable, but you wrote after a particular exchange with Paul Scalnik, where it was clear that he had kind of been scamming you and leading you along. And I'm sure you'll know the thing I'm about to read back to you. You wrote my revulsion at that moment, was not reserved for Scalnik, who had known that he would be rewarded all those years ago for telling just the right story. It was for the entire apparatus that enabled and encouraged him. The detectives, prosecutors, eager for convictions, the judges who allowed his testimony, and the appellate judges who rubber stamped it all. As a citizen, which, you know, us journalists are, as well as what we do for our job, how does that revulsion sit with you now, having kind of completed this project? How has it changed how you see the country around you? I think that I just want people to pay more attention to what's going on in our courts. Do you know who your local prosecutor is? Are you reading about the choices they're making as a prosecutor about what to charge, who to charge, and who not to charge whether here in the States, whether they're using the death penalty or not? Are you voting? Are you serving on juries? I think people spend so much time, I'm certainly guilty of this, on social media, and expressing their views very passionately on social media. I hope this book and the work that I do compels people to go out there in the world and do just the simplest things are duties as citizens and to really educate ourselves and be involved in our communities and have a say in what prosecutors are doing. And just to come back then to the kind of the emotional, the beating heart of your book, which is Jim daily, and just the unbearable reality that he lives in. So just tell us now he's still on death row, he's 80 years old. What are his options, if any? So really his remaining option would be a shift in the political landscape and Ron DeSantis is term limited. There's about to be a gubernatorial election in Florida in November. So we'll see what the outcome of that is. I think my takeaway is that I could very well be wrong. I don't know that the answer lies in the courts. I think so many things have been tried and have failed. But something that I stressed in my book, I talk about both Jim and Paul Skellneck at the ends of their lives. So Jim is still here in vibrant, but he is 80 and has all the health concerns you might imagine for someone who's gotten medical care from a prison system for so long. But Paul Skellneck died in March of 2020 right as the pandemic was descending. And I went to see him shortly before that and was so struck by how miserable and alone he was. He was bedridden. He was his chest, which he didn't have a shirt on when I came into his room at the nursing home where he was was covered in tattoos bragging about his military service in Vietnam, which I knew was a creation of his. He had never actually been there. And the sort of mirror image of these two men, one who traded on the idea that he went to Vietnam and never went versus this man, Jim, who was very damaged by his very real time there. I thought was fascinating. But Skellneck was desperately alone. And he, I sat with him for about six hours and spoke with him. And he grabbed my hand when I told him it was time for me to go. And he said, when it's time for me to die, will you come and sit with me? And I was so struck by that contrasted with Jim. And what I'm about to say about Jim is not to diminish the hell of his life right now. But he has a very rich emotional life that he's created for himself. So he has deep family ties. He's reconciled with his ex-wife Mary Kay. He has pen pals who he corresponds with. His children, his grandchildren, his many, many friends. He has friends on death row. Some men he's taught how to read. And he's helped them with commissary items that they need. And he buys paints from the commissary there that he makes these beautiful paintings with all of the natural world of landscapes or animals of this world that he's not in anymore. And I think that you're going to make me show up. Sorry for listeners. I've gone. I'm crying. What I wanted to stress at the end of the book is both that Jim is caught in this horrible system, but also that he has somehow created as beautiful of a life as one can create within those confines. And that at the end, you know, in his late years, he is a richer man for it than skeletonic ever was. Yeah. Well, I mean, as you can tell from my response and yes, listeners, we've both got tears in our eyes. The injustice of what Jim daily has experienced and the fact that he remains incarcerated by the end of Pamela's book, you just feel so outraged and disgusted by the system. Pamela, thank you for for spending time and talking to us about your work and thank you for writing it. It's an extraordinary piece of reporting. Thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for your incredibly intelligent and moving questions. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. Next week, my colleagues Carl Matheson and Poppy Bullard investigate the rise of Christian nationalism in the UK. It's a fascinating story about the man who converted Tommy Robinson. Do listen. We'll see you then.