Pamela Colloff: Weaponizing the criminal justice system

Funding for Overheard with Evan Smith comes from Hill co-partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claren Carl Stewart, Christine and Philip Dial, Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication, Eller Group.com. Diane Land and Steve Adler, and Carrie and Chris Odo. I'm Evan Smith. She's an award-winning journalist for Pro Publica and the New York Times magazine whose focus is the criminal justice systems many failures. Her first book is Catch the Devil, a true story of murder, deception and injustice on the Gulf Coast. She's Pamela Kohloff. This is Overheard. A platform and a voice is a powerful thing. You really turn the conversation around about what we should should be about. Are we blowing this? Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie as an industry? We have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else. This is Overheard. Pam welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's so great to see you and to be with you and congratulations on this. Thank you so much. It's exciting. By the time people see this it will not yet be out but it will be out soon. I've had the benefit of reading it. It is an absolutely great book. Thank you. You must be so excited. I'm very excited. I finally, finally wrote a book after many years of saying I wouldn't. Yeah. And I'm just really happy to be here. And the story is a story that you've wanted to tell at length, right? For some time you've written about the subject these characters over the years but this is an opportunity to tell the story. As you told me the other day in a form in which it deserves, right? You couldn't possibly capture the depth and the complexity of this story as a magazine piece. Yes, I tried and when I finished the magazine piece I was like there's so much more here. Like I've barely scratched the surface. But this story to me was something I had to go into deeper because it's a story that sort of lays bare all of the deepest problems in my opinion of the criminal justice system. But it's one I can tell through a really engaging character with immersive storytelling and that character is a con artist named Paul Scalnick. Right. He actually started off in Austin in the early 70s and got writing hot checks and that was the last honest job he ever had and then he went on to a life of being a professional con artist, came to Florida and amassed this incredible rap sheet. But he had this trick, this sort of get out of jail free card that he would always play a literal get out of jail card. Literal, literal. Yeah. And what that was was he would, you know, as a former cop, be able to sort of assess these other people in the jail. You know, who were prosecutors the most hungry to get a conviction from? Right. In jail you're mostly pretrial and you know you're awaiting trial. And then he would go to prosecutors or police and he would say that guy just confessed everything to me. Prosecutors would put him on the stand. This was done in upwards of 40 cases. Right. Some in Texas, many in Florida. Any help send dozens of men to prison and some to death row. To death row and none of these confessions were real. No. And prosecutors knew exactly who he was. He was a professional con artist. Right. And he conned them. Yes. Right. But I think as you point out in this book, he did what he did. But if the system were not situated to enable his con, none of this would have happened. This is not all on him. This is on them. That's exactly. I think it might be easy to think this is a story about this incredibly talented con artist. And of course he is very good at what he does. Right. But he would have just been another guy pulling scams in Florida if not for this institutional buy-in to what he was doing. He was useful to them. Right. And so even long after it was time, you know, to realize that this was a professional con artist who should not be trusted, he was being put in these increasingly important trials. And in return, he got his freedom. So his crime victims, and it started off with petty theft. Right. And it escalated from there. He had some, what I might call some Epstein proclivities. Right. Those crimes. He abused young girls. He did. I mean, the thing is he was enabled to do that by the failure of the system to protect those girls from him. Yes. Right. And because he was so useful to prosecutors in these other, you know, murder cases, that was really swept under the rug. One of the most powerful and interesting things I did reporting the book was tracking down some of those women, now my age, who were teenagers at the time, who had never been believed or- But opened up to you. Who did? And the process of finding them was very difficult. Right. And getting them to talk, but it was important. So this began as a story that pro-publica and the Times Magazine published in 2019. The end of 2019. And at 2019. At that time, you told me you thought there's more here. There's so much more here. I mean, you- Always it's when you write the story. Do you know at the time you're writing the story that you're also going to do something else? You're going to make it into a movie or it's going to become a book and you gather material at that time thinking, I'm not going to use this now, but I'm going to use it later. You knew. I knew. And I had spent a year investigating that magazine piece. Right. And there was a lot in it, but it just felt like there's so much more here. How did this happen? What other things did he do? Right. And just the, you know, his life itself. I was able to find that he- Well, he's a great character. He's incredible. And he was, you know, I spent some time with him while working on the book. Yeah. He was married to nine different women. Some of them at the same time. He was a big mist. And he was a conman. Yes. Right. He was very, very charming. Yeah. Yeah. So let's start with the beginning of the book and then go to the end of the book because I do think these sort of two poles are interesting in terms of how you chose to tell the story. The first scene in this book, you go see him in federal- federal prison in Texas. Yes. Right. You meet him for the first time. I met him for the first time and he totally had winked me and I thought that was an important place to start the book. Right. Because I think there's always the problem when you read about a conman that you think, well, you know, these robes, like I would never- I will see through it. You know, I would never fall for that. Right. And here I am. I'm an investigative journalist. I know he's a con artist. Right. I'm going to see him in federal prison. There's like a lot of red flags. And he, we had this, this just crazy introduction where he began by telling me, I'm dying. And he, you know, pulled out this bloody rag and he said these are my last days. And then, you know, he sized me up very quickly and he said, but, you know, what you've come to talk to me about, that's a story that must be told. And I want to help you tell it. And if it's the last thing I do before I die. And, you know, I made this elated phone call to my magazine editor at ProPublica Tracey Webber on the way home from Dallas to Austin. And I was like, we've got it. We've got it. And I spent months trying to come back to see him, writing him emails, all the things. You know, there's always something. He was too sick to meet with me or there was a problem in the mail room. And anyone would have realized long before me, like, okay, this is not happening. But I wanted it so badly. Right. And that's what he was so good at, like, sizing me up, knowing what I wanted, telling me what I wanted to hear and then making me believe it. I promised you the moon and then didn't deliver. Yes. And in the end, didn't deliver. But that's also the impetus for the book because it was a challenge. It was like, okay, now he's not going to tell me anything. Right. So my revenge will be finding out everything. Well, it is a good, as it did reporter, you sometimes have cooperation. Right. And sometimes you don't. Sometimes Glenn Powell gives you the interview. Yes. And sometimes he doesn't, but you have to interview everybody else around him and you write the story anyway. And in some ways, taking that same thing in this case, you did all the reporting around this guy. I did. Right. And in many ways, that ended up being a blessing because he didn't have a lot of insight into himself. But what that allowed me to do was to focus on all the people left in his wake. Right. You know, all these women wives, their daughters, these men, some of whom are still stuck in prison 40 years later. Right. And to tell the story through them. Right. So they're really the motor of the book. Well, let me just acknowledge also any con man would not have been worth a book. Might not even have been worth a magazine story. But I mean, this guy is an extraordinary character. And what he, the what was left in his wake is extraordinary. And now let's go to the end because of the men left behind bars. The most heartbreaking of all is Jim daily. Yes. You begin the book going to see Paul Scalnick. You end the book with Jim daily, effectively now kind of contemporary. Right. Say who he is and how he was impacted by Paul Scalnick along the way. So as Scalnick started telling these stories and prosecutors were having so much success with him, they would always get convictions if he was put on the stand or they would get these punishing sentences that they were looking for and to be cleared. You know, many of these men were guilty, but the difference between a 15-year sentence and a life sentence is pretty significant. And Scalnick was the one who could make that happen. And also to be clear, a good case never needs a jailhouse informant. You need a jailhouse informant when something is wrong with your case, when you don't have enough. Jim Dealey ended up being accused of a murder that occurred in 1985 in Pinellas County, Florida. Very long story short, there's no forensic evidence, there's no motive. The clear killer appears to be his housemate at the time who tried to pin it on him. And that housemate has since confessed numerous times to the murder and then recanted the confessions. But it doesn't matter because once someone like Scalnick testifies, it's codified. It's very, very hard to undo that. Once, you know, you've given live jury testimony and a jury has found someone guilty, it's very, very hard to undo that. Right. So Jim Dealey ends up being one of Paul Scalnick's victims as it were. And this was back in the day when the electric chair was used in Florida. That's what he was looking at. Now it's lethal injection. But he's been sitting on death row since 1990. So Jim Dealey ends up on death row because this con man says he confessed. Correct. So Jim Dealey is on death row. In fact, he has a date to be executed and then the pandemic happens. Yes. So while I was writing the article, he, Rhonda Santas, signed a death warrant. He later got a stay. He was stuck on what's called death watch, which is this cell that's 30 feet away from the execution. Right. Like the on-deck circle, right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And then the pandemic happened. And he was stuck there for-- I want to say close to nine months. And it was this strange-- as awful as that was-- as COVID was ripping through penitentiaries, he actually, strangely, his life was preserved by being on death watch. And so I looked on the Florida Department of Corrections, whatever the formal name of that agency is this morning. Jim Dealey is still on death row. Yes. He-- if he were executed in Florida, he does not have a date of execution yet. But he would be the oldest person ever executed in the state of Florida. Correct. He turns 80 in June. Has all the health problems you can imagine for someone who's gotten health care in prison for 40 years. And Paul Scalnick is dead. He's dead, but he went free. I mean, except for that time when I went to see him in federal prison, he spent most of his time out and out. Now, out and out amongst. But I guess I bring up the fact that Paul Scalnick is dead, because theoretically, Paul Scalnick, copying to having made this up would be a necessary condition to Jim Dealey getting off death row. I mean, the question is, in a state like Florida, which we'll talk about in a second, is rivaling Texas to be the killing of state in the country. It has surpassed Texas in this regard, which is really an achievement. I mean, the likelihood of Jim Dealey, who is the victim again of this con man who is now dead, getting off death row, like what's going to make that happen? I went back to see Scalnick shortly before he did die. And in 2020. In 2020, he died at the very beginning of the pandemic. But not COVID. Yes. It was March of 2020. It was like his last great escape. You didn't have to go through all that. Did that go through COVID, right? That we did. And I went to see him twice and said, Jim Dealey has a date. And at the time, I was going to be a witness for that. It was very real. It was a month of counting down the clock, because it's a very short period there. Had this really happened, would he consider recanting? And he refused. He refused. He refused. You have no doubt that Jim Dealey is innocent. Correct. 100% certain that he's innocent. And yet he sits on death row. Why is the criminal justice system so screwed up? It is not just jailhouse snitches. It's the unreliability of eyewitness identification, it's, you know, the forensics around arson are unreliable. Bytemark testimony is unreliable. When they do forensics on hair samples, it's unreliable. You are a certified blood spatter expert. You went to school for that, right? That's true. You did. Blood spatter testimony. In fact, you wrote the greatest piece of journalism in the history of blood spatter. A bad guy named Joe-- Not a lot of competence. Joe was OK, but take the win. Take the definition. Take the W on that one. A guy named Joe Bryan. A famous case who you got out of jail. Well, I'm on parole. He was never exonerated. I say you got him out. Thank you. But the point is all of these ways in which crimes are investigated, people are prosecuted, to a one, they're all unreliable, not dimensioned things that are as mundane as the inadequacy of loyering for some of these folks who are arrested. There's so many issues. We could talk about that for hours. But junk science in the courtroom is a big interest of mine. And so bloodstain pattern analysis for anyone who's seen dexter. The idea is that you see blood spatters at the crime scene. And then from that, you can sort of reverse engineer the choreography of the crime. Which if it sounds crazy on its face. It is. And I had seen people testify to this and just could not figure out how this was considered a science. So I signed up for a class that everyone has to take to testify about this. I went to a rural police department in Oklahoma for a week and learned anything and everything about blood spatter. And I am now, you know, you could call me theoretically as an expert witness. Dr. Kolaugh, Dr. Bloodspatter. But that was the sole training, a week long class, that the person in the Joe Brian case who testified for the prosecution and tied all these things together that made him look guilty. That was the totality of his training. That was what I had. But surely the criminal justice system, as I'm referring to it, like an institution, of course, it's a lot of things. The criminal justice system surely knows how bad it is and all of this. It's been pointed out over and over and over. Why isn't it better? Why can't they learn? I mean, that's the great question. I mean, there's people have been shouting about junk science for so long. Yeah. For all these issues, just to quickly bring it back to jailhouse informants, we know that a quarter of death row exonerations were based, the underlying convictions were based on jailhouse informant testimony. A quarter. 20% of DNA exonerations. So that's, you know, you're 100% sure those are in part based on that kind of testimony. And this has been known for a while. So I think the criminal justice system really values the concept of finality. And the idea is that alive jury heard testimony and in real time they were able to assess the credibility of witnesses and all of the evidence and that their verdict is the sacrosanth thing. What's hard is in the criminal justice system, we look back, we look at precedent. Yeah. In forensic science, we look forward. And so there's this disconnect between what we know about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and all these things with what's actually happening in courtrooms. Rip it, how many people have to be exonerated? People who claim they were innocent from the very first from the jump. Right. How many people have to be exonerated for us to stand back from this and say something is wrong here? Right. I mean, last night there were two men who were executed. Two executions, one in Texas, one in Florida. Both of them innocent. Well, what I would say is both of them had innocence claims. But in both instances, in the case of the Texas 599th person executed in Texas since 1973. Yeah. Right, more than any other state. More than a third of all executions nationwide in the state of Texas. It's a cousin who confessed. I believe that's right. In the case of Florida, there was somebody else who had confessed repeatedly to other people. The brother. The brother. Yeah. So in both instances, other people said, no, no, I did it. Right. And just to give you a sense of sort of the recalcitrance of the courts to deal with this. And a lot of this is appellate judges just rubber stamping what comes before them. Yeah. But Florida has the highest rate right now of executions. And it also has the highest rate of death row exonerations. 30 men. 30 men have been exonerated from Florida's death row. That is, that suggests a big problem. Yeah. And I don't want to be here to suggest that everybody who has these convictions is innocent. Of course. But what these cases highlight is it's all the same types of witnesses and evidence in other cases as well. Right. We pay more attention to the death row cases. Right. I mean, that's on the death panel speaking of finality. So on this question of the death penalty, you know, Texas has, as I said, had this reputation. And the data is there to prove it that it is the killing of state over time. But of late, you know, a record low or near record low number of executions annually, a near record low. number of death sentences annually, death row right now only 160 only, 167 people on death row in Texas which is the smallest number in 41 years. What's going on? So there's a very strange disconnect going on right now and that is that the number of death sentences that judges and juries are handing down are in all time low and it's incredibly dramatic. So in 1986, so you know 40 years ago, I believe it was 325 death sentences were handed down nationwide last year it was 23. So it's staggering when you think about the change in public opinion about capital punishment. But at the same time there's been this incredible drop. We are starting to have especially in the past year and in part because of the Trump administration and an executive order they handed down telling prosecutors to double down on the death penalty. We actually have this rise again. So twice as many people were executed last year as were the year before. So this may be going back up. So it may be going back up and there are all these political pressures and reasons for that and just to give you a sense of the tenor of things, the Justice Department in April announced that they're bringing back firing squads for federal executions. So this is not your kinder gentler. Just when you think you're in the basement, there's always another basement. That's kind of the world we're living in. We have a couple minutes left. You grew up in New York, you went to Brown University. Why didn't you do something other than journalism? Why was this your thing? I think just honestly telling stories has always been, you know, I was a failed fiction writer. That's what I wanted to be in high school and realized I was really bad at it. And that if I actually was given the storyline and the characters that figuring out how to tell that story would be more interesting. Right. And then just getting out in the world and talking to so many different people. But I was sort of the classic 90s cliche of Slacker Austin. I moved here. I married a musician. You waited on tables? I waited tables by night and wrote by day. And, you know, loved having the community here of artists and filmmakers and musicians and writers. Yeah. Well, what I remember because we do know each other for a long time was you writing to me when I was an editor of Texas Monthly. You were working, I think, writing for unpatrol. Texas Highway Patrol magazine. Texas Highway Patrol. You have to take what you can get. Right. I was, uh, the magazine for motorcycle costs. Well, they need a magazine, right? I was ghost writing a column called Ask the Officer. And when I started talking to Evan, I was living so close to the old airport that when he would call, I would have to, I'd be like, hold on, I have another call and I would put it in the pillow while the plane flew overhead. So that I didn't know. Yeah. It was a interesting time. You conned me. I'm excited to tell. Right. What I've told people for years is you wrote to me the very best pitch for a story that you wanted to write for Texas Monthly that I had ever seen before or since. And, you know, the thing about magazine writers, some of them can pitch great stories but can execute. Some of them don't know how to pitch, but write great stories. You're one of the only people I know who was a 10 out of 10 at both. And I feel like back then when you showed up at Texas Monthly, at the beginning of what I think of as your magazine career, we all knew that you were going to be this person one day. Thank you. I certainly had no idea. So thank you. And I learned, I learned so much of what I know from you. And, um, I remember there was one editing choice. I was so mad about in the 90s. I was like, he's just wrong. And you let me win it. And I went back recently and read it and you were right. Was I right? Actually, it's okay. Get a mulligan. It's absolutely right. Um, over those years that you've been in magazine writing, again, you're at ProPublica and the New York Times magazine. You're not at Us Weekly, right? You could have chosen with this ability to tell stories. You could have chosen to write about politics. You can be writing about Susie Wiles now, or you can be writing about Olivia Rodrigo now. And instead, you're writing about Paul Scalnick. Why was this particular sub-specialty? The thing as a magazine writer over these years that you cared about so much? I'm sure I need a lot of psychoanalysis to figure that out. But I do, I mean, these are just the stories I can't stop thinking about. These are the stories when I'm brushing my teeth or driving in the car that I can't, I can't get out of my head. And I want to try to figure out why they happened. And I also just have always been interested in what people do in the worst moments of their lives. You know, whether it's the victims in this or perpetrators, that sort of tension is narratively really, really interesting and compelling. And I keep saying that I'm going to start writing stories, you know, with rainbows and unicorns in them. But I, the dark side keeps drying me back. Not unless a rainbow falls from this guy and kills a unicorn. Will you write that story? That would work. It could happen one day. All right, we'll have to stop there. I think this book is so great. I think everybody should buy it. I think everybody should read it. And I'm so happy for your success. Thank you so much. Kamala Koloff. Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overhered to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests and an archive of past episodes. With the price that is paid by these men and by the victim's families who've been sold the wrong story all these years is just so heartbreaking. And I think also when you hear a clearance rate like that, that he always cracks the case. Anyone who's not being skeptical of that, it's too good to be true. Funding for Overheard with Evan Smith comes from Hill co-partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claren Carl Stewart, Christine and Philip Dial, Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication, Eller Group dot com. Dianne Land and Steve Adler, and Carrie and Chris Odo.