How America’s Courts Fell for a Con Man |
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How America’s Courts Fell for a Con Man
In her new book Catch the Devil, reporter Pamela Colloff traces the life and crimes of a mendacious jailhouse informant and exposes the systems that allowed him to walk free.
Pamela Colloff (right), author of the book Catch the Devil, on a panel
The first time I saw Pamela Colloff, she was on stage at an overwhelmingly beige convention hall in a New Orleans Marriott. Colloff, a reporter at Propublica and staff writer at New York Times Magazine, was a headliner in one of the few places journalists are cool enough to headline anything: a professional conference for investigative reporters. In a packed, exquisitely air conditioned room—it was New Orleans in the summer, after all—dozens of media workers sat knee to knee on carpet when the room’s few hundred or so chairs filled just to hear Colloff explain her writing process.Colloff has been a criminal justice journalist for decades. She developed her knack for that brand of reporting as a staffer at Texas Monthly—a job she landed fresh out of college when Austin rent was still $300 a month. In the years since, her work has focused on the wrongly incarcerated and the myriad institutional failings of the US criminal justice system.
Colloff’s first book, Catch The Devil follows her reporting for The New York Times and ProPublica on Paul Skalnik, a jailhouse informant whose false testimony helped prosecutors across the American south secure the convictions of dozens of men, one of whom is still on death row. In exchange for his testimony, detectives and prosecutors awarded Skalnik—whose rap sheet included fraud, grand theft, and an arrest for child sexual abuse—sweetheart deals like sentence reductions, early release, and at one point, an unsanctioned conjugal visit.
Catch The Devil traces Skalnik’s life, as well as those of his victims, who make up a diverse group of scammed ex-wives, molested girls, and incarcerated men. Colloff’s pain-staking, comprehensive reporting is a scathing indictment of a country where prosecutors are so often politically incentivized to get a conviction regardless of a defendant’s actual guilt.Colloff sat down with The Nation to discuss her new book, the state of journalism, and why she’s fascinated with the decisions people make in the worst moments of their lives. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Henry Fernandez: After you won the Hillman Prize in 2020 for your initial investigative piece on Paul Skalnik, you said in a video statement, “I’ve come to the conclusion that jailhouse informants simply should not be in American courtrooms.” In the six and a half years since, has your opinion on jailhouse informants stayed the same? If so, can you explain to our readers how your reporting led you to this conclusion?
Pamela Colloff: No, my opinion has not changed. If you look at how jailhouse informants function in the criminal justice system, the fact that they are what we call “incentivized witnesses” makes their use very problematic. Informants come with all sorts of complications and issues. But, I think people are most used to encountering an informant in an organized crime case, where you’re trying to penetrate a group of people and their activities, and there’s one person who flips and works with prosecutors. Obviously, there are issues with this, but at least that person was in the thick of the activity or a witness to the activity that’s at the center of the case.
A jailhouse informant is someone in jail alongside people in pre-trial detention. They have everything on the line, and they’re about to go to trial or decide whether or not to take a plea. The basic conceit of a jailhouse informant, I think, is very hard to buy. We’re not talking about people who’ve already been convicted and have been living alongside fellow prisoners for years. Jail is not a place where you’re talking openly about your crimes.
But the supposed informant knows that anything helpful they bring forward to the prosecution will be beneficial to them. Jurors don’t know that, on the back end, the understanding is that the informant will be rewarded with a sentence reduction or tried on a lesser charge in exchange for their testimony.
So, when you put all those things together, the idea that this has a place in our system just doesn’t make sense to me. If you have a good case, you don’t need a jailhouse informant. When you see that a case has a jailhouse informant, it’s a red flag that something’s wrong with the case and that the evidence isn’t good enough.
HF: Something I find fascinating about this book is the way it traces the failures of a variety of American systems—whether it be the courts, the American military, the school system or law enforcement. What did writing this book teach you about the systems that govern the US?
PC: Skalnik, on his own, was just a small-time con artist. To cause all the damage he did, he had to be enabled by a larger system. That system was law enforcement, which wanted to close cases. It was prosecutors who wanted to secure convictions and get long sentences. It was judges who wanted to move cases through their docket and not ask the questions they........