Paul Skalnik was one of the most prolific jailhouse snitches in American history. A new best-selling book, Catch the Devil, chronicles Skalnik's career helping prosecutors secure dozens of convictions—despite being a serial liar and criminal. His cartoonishly long rap sheet included elaborate frauds, multiple grand thefts, and sexual assault of a child; at various times, he passed himself off as a Southwest Airlines executive, a high-powered attorney, and a Vietnam War hero. In July, Reason's Billy Binion interviewed author Pamela Colloff, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and reporter at ProPublica.

Q: How is it possible for someone with such an intense history of dishonesty to still earn the state's trust for decades?

A: I think you hit upon the big question of the book, right? Skalnik was a former police officer himself, so he sort of knew how the game worked. When he got to whatever county jail he ended up in, he could size up whoever it was that prosecutors most wanted a conviction against. And he would produce these incredible quote-unquote "confessions." And in return for his testimony about those confessions, he would usually be let free.

You can imagine how there were police and prosecutors who bought this. I think what becomes more difficult as he's used more widely in [Pinellas County,] Florida—where he helped send upward of 40 men to prison—at what point does someone say, "What are the odds that this guy in the jail has a better batting record than our best detectives?" No one ever says that.

Q: The book covers a lot of disturbing cases, but the one central to it is a murder case in Florida. Can you set the scene?

A: There was a 14-year-old girl named Shelly Boggio who was found in a body of water. She'd been stabbed over 30 times, and the assumption was that she'd been sexually assaulted.

The investigation quickly narrows down to a man named Jack Pearcy, who had a long history of violence against women. He was the last person seen with Boggio. When he's interviewed by investigators, he realizes they know too much. So he pivots to saying that he had his housemate—Jim Dailey—with him that night, and that it was Jim who committed this crime. Jim did not have that kind of record, and there's no physical or forensic evidence tying him to the crime, or any motive whatsoever.

Skalnik is brought in very shortly before the trial starts. He is moved in the jail to be close to where Jim Dailey was. Within 24 hours, he says he has procured Dailey's confession—a total stranger who's awaiting trial. It was a story that really played upon jurors' sympathies. He talked about how Jim Dailey had supposedly told him about stabbing Shelly Boggio to death and how she'd been staring at him in this pleading way, but she wouldn't die. It's this horrific image, and he is sentenced to death.

Q: What makes you think Dailey is actually innocent?

A: There have been over 200 people in the U.S. who were sentenced to death who have since been exonerated. We know that jailhouse informants—who are notoriously unreliable—are a factor in 25 percent of those wrongful convictions.

As far as Jim's case, there's no there there. When you see a case with three jailhouse informants, no physical evidence, no motive, and your quote-unquote "eyewitness" is the main suspect in the case? There are a lot of questions.

Q: To me, the secondary theme was that when credible evidence may exonerate someone after a jury has rendered a verdict, it is depressingly difficult to get another chance.

A: I am obsessed with this idea that the system is built to compound its own errors. When new evidence comes out—and there's a lot of new evidence that comes out over the years that really points toward his innocence—you would think that would be enough. For some very good reasons, a jury verdict is sacrosanct. But what you see is that courts really look backward at precedent and jury verdicts rather than forward at new evidence.

Jim gets terrific attorneys in this case—too late. They do incredible work, and it doesn't matter. Too many judges have rubber-stamped this testimony by Paul Skalnik. There's no way for the courts to essentially say, "Hey, let's go back and look at this holistically and see if any of this makes sense." It was shocking to me to see that.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Pamela Colloff on America's Biggest Jailhouse Snitch, Wrongful Convictions, and Criminal Justice appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Eight years ago, Scott Hancock, then 28, helped a 19-year-old acquaintance, identified in court records as T.G., buy fentanyl. At her request, Hancock, who had been addicted to opioids for years, got in touch with his drug dealer, who gave him five capsules that he handed over to T.G. in exchange for $20. Then Hancock gave the money to his dealer. Because T.G. subsequently died from a fentanyl overdose, Hancock is serving a 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Illinois.

That was the mandatory minimum sentence under 21 USC 241, which prescribes penalties for drug distribution resulting in death. Although that law has been on the books since 1986, the dramatic increase in fentanyl-related deaths during the last decade prompted a surge in federal drug prosecutions involving overdoses, which rose by 44 percent between FY 2019 and FY 2023. Hancock's case was part of that trend, and it prompted his mother, G.D. Hancock, a retired finance professor, to delve into the subject, resulting in a database that sheds light on what happens when the government treats accidental deaths as homicides.

So far, Hancock has identified 2,930 sentences in such cases since 2010. That includes 1,399 federal cases and 1,531 state cases, which rely either on laws dealing specifically with drug-induced deaths or on more general statutes addressing felony murder, "depraved heart" homicide, or manslaughter.

Sentences of 20 years or more were pretty common at the federal level, accounting for 37 percent of the cases, compared to 13 percent at the state level. The vast majority of the cases (84 percent) were resolved by plea deals. That is not surprising, given the potential consequences of going to trial. While the median sentence for defendants who pleaded guilty was nine years, it was 20 years for defendants who insisted on making the government prove its case.

Hancock's tally is based on news reports, court records, announcements by state and federal prosecutors, her own "case files and research," and "cases sent in by families, lawyers and researchers." A separate database compiled by researchers at Northeastern University, drawn from news reports, includes 3,264 cases involving drug-induced homicide from 2011 to 2022.

These prosecutions are morally nonsensical. They treat people who voluntarily consume drugs as helpless victims of supposed predators who gave them the drugs they wanted. By similar logic, bartenders and liquor store owners should be held criminally liable whenever a customer succumbs to alcohol poisoning or the long-term effects of heavy drinking. The main difference is the legal status of the drug, which is arbitrary, politically determined, and historically contingent. And while illegal drugs pose special hazards, that is a result of prohibition, which creates a black market where product composition is highly variable and unpredictable.

Charging people with homicide based on accidental overdoses would be illogical and unjust even if the defendants were limited to actual drug dealers. But you can be charged with drug-induced homicide even if your "trafficking" consisted of nothing more than sharing drugs with a relative, romantic partner, friend, or acquaintance. Based on the information Hancock was able to glean, she counts 241 cases where the person who died from an overdose was the defendant's friend, partner, or family member, and other sources suggest such prosecutions are common.

The Northeastern University researchers analyzed a sample of 213 online news reports from 2000 to 2017. They found that 50 percent of defendants charged with drug-induced homicide were caretakers, family members, friends, or partners of the people who died.

In 2021, when the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review examined Pennsylvania prosecutions for "drug delivery resulting in death" (DDRD), it described a case involving "a Westmoreland County man" who "died from an overdose of drugs he'd gotten from a friend of a friend of a friend." Although "the drugs ultimately came from a man called 'Bee' in Penn Hills," the paper noted, "the three individuals between the victim and Bee were all charged" with DDRD, a first-degree felony punishable by up to 40 years in prison.

The Tribune-Review described several other DDRD defendants, including "a Delmont woman" who "called paramedics when she found her boyfriend unresponsive in their bathroom"; "two friends" who bought heroin for a man who overdosed at a Taco Bell; and "a Monessen woman" who "sent her cousin to buy a brick of heroin" and "sold five stamp bags to a friend, who then sold four bags to an Elizabeth Borough man who died from a fatal overdose."

The Tribune-Review also found that "many facing these charges are relatively low-level dealers." Jonathan Fodi, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, told the paper he and his colleagues had never seen a DDRD case involving a high-level dealer. Given the need to prove a link between the defendant and the person who died, that is not surprising. But that situation compounds the injustice of treating such deaths as homicides, since low-level dealers often do not know exactly what is in the drugs they are selling.

A 2002 analysis of 32 drug-induced homicide prosecutions, published in the New Jersey Law Journal, found that "25 involved prosecution of friends of the decedent who did not sell drugs in any significant manner." According to a 2017 report by a Wisconsin TV station that looked at the 100 most recent prosecutions for drug-induced homicide in that state, "nearly 90% of those charged were friends or relatives of the person who died, or the lowest people in the drug supply chain." When the Chicago Tribune examined drug-induced homicide cases filed between 2011 and 2014, it found "the defendant was typically the last person who was with the person who overdosed."

Even people who support the war on drugs should be able to recognize the injustice of sending people to prison for 10 or 20 years based on their tangential roles in deaths they neither caused nor intended. And far from making such deaths less likely, that policy impedes potentially lifesaving medical assistance because the risk of a homicide charge is apt to discourage bystanders from calling for help. That daunting deterrent undermines the goal of "Good Samaritan" laws that are supposed to shield 911 callers from criminal charges in such situations.

The official justification for these prosecutions is completely disconnected from the reality of the cases. "Deaths from illicit drugs, especially fentanyl, are at historic highs," the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said in a 2023 press release. Because the DEA is "committed to protecting Americans and saving lives by pursuing those responsible," the agency explained, it aims to "make sure as many drug traffickers involved in those deaths as possible get an appearance in front of a judge."

As an example of that strategy, the DEA cited Scott Hancock's case, describing him as a "trafficker" who was "found guilty of providing the drugs that killed a 19-year-old woman in 2018." Given the details of that transaction, it is hard to see the logic here. Sending someone like Hancock to prison for 20 years has nothing to do with "saving lives."

The post How Helping Someone Buy Drugs Can Send You to Prison for 20 Years appeared first on Reason Magazine.

School resource officers (SROs) in Texas referred tens of thousands of elementary and middle schoolers for prosecution for relatively minor misconduct over the last decade, a news investigation found.

An analysis by The New York Times and the San Antonio Express-News reported that, as the number of SROs in Texas grew, children in Texas ages 10 to 13 were referred to prosecution for misbehaving in school more than 47,000 times since 2014. A referral doesn't necessarily result in charges being filed, but each one represents a minor being taken into police custody and put in contact with the criminal justice system, which can have long-lasting educational, emotional, and financial impacts for students and their families.

"Most of the students were accused of minor offenses, like making threats, using cannabis vapes or lashing out at classmates or teachers," the papers reported. "Few caused serious physical harm."

Among the examples cited by the Times and Express-News were an 11-year-old who bumped into a school counselor, a 10-year-old who said he saw someone on campus with a weapon, and a 10-year-old who kicked an assistant principal after his cellphone was taken away. 

In one case, a 12-year-old girl who refused to go to the principal's office was handcuffed, arrested, and driven to the school police headquarters. "When she would not put her hand on a fingerprint machine, officers twisted her opposite arm behind her back until she screamed and complied, according to body camera footage," the outlets reported.

The analysis found that referrals of children 10 to 13 increased by a greater percentage than referrals of older students. (Children under 10 cannot be prosecuted under Texas law; many other states don't set a minimum age for delinquency.)

The two outlets published another joint investigation in May on how SROs in Texas schools have used heavy-handed tactics, including Tasers and pepper spray, against students over seemingly minor misconduct.

The findings mirror other recent studies. A report published in July by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa found that, while SROs were placed in Iowa schools to keep students safe from violence, the threat they most commonly dealt with was illicit vaping.

The number of police in schools nationally dramatically increased in recent years, growing by 23 percent at high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools between 2018 and 2021, largely under the justification of stopping mass shootings and handling violent situations.

Organizations like the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) say that carefully selected, well-trained officers act as a filter and decrease arrests by building strong relationships within the school with staff and students.

Civil liberties groups and disability advocates have long argued that increases in school police and zero-tolerance policies for petty disturbances have fueled the "school-to-prison" pipeline and led to disproportionate enforcement against minorities and students with disabilities. Those groups have been aided by viral news stories of police arresting and assaulting school children.

Following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and national calls for police reform, several major school districts across the country ended their SRO programs. 

However, several states that experienced horrific school shootings, like Florida and Texas, moved in the opposite direction, passing laws that required police officers or armed guardians in public schools.

A 2020 Reason investigation described how Florida schools had become a high-stakes experiment in policing after Florida more than doubled the number of SROs across the state following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. A study published in 2020 found that after the increase, the number of Florida school arrests—which had been declining for years—suddenly started to rise. There was also a sharp increase in the use of physical restraint against students.

A 2021 working paper by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which billed itself as the broadest and most rigorous examination at the school level of how SROs impact student outcomes, found that while SROs "do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools," they did not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.

Another study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the firm Westat, who studied several dozen middle and high schools in California, found that increasing the number of SROs led to both immediate and persistent increases in the number of drug and weapon offenses and the number of suspensions and expulsions of students.

The post Texas School Police Referred Tens of Thousands of Children to Prosecutors for Minor Misbehavior appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Walking through East Cleveland, Ohio, feels a touch like you've wandered onto the set of a postapocalyptic film noir. Grand, gilded homes announce themselves on neighborhood streets, some crowned with turrets, many with windows punched out like missing teeth. Often, no one is home, because no one lives there. It is safer than 1 percent of U.S. cities.

So why did local law enforcement pour considerable time and resources into pursuing a man for a sound truck?

That question is not really a legal one, at least not in the most technical sense. But it is the driving force behind a thorny case a federal court recently resuscitated: Fambrough v. City of East Cleveland, a saga concerning a man whose vehicle became an obsessive target of the East Cleveland Police Department (ECPD) after he used it to campaign for a mayoral challenger.

Some of the facts are in dispute. But the basic gist is as follows: William Fambrough, long a politically engaged East Clevelander, campaigned for Juanita Gowdy—a challenger to then-Mayor Brandon King—by broadcasting messages around the city with his sound truck. That ultimately came to an end after law enforcement impounded the car, cited him for parking and noise violations, and prosecuted him for the latter.

Fambrough sued, alleging the complex legal odyssey set into motion over his step van amounted to First Amendment retaliation, an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment, and a violation of the 14th Amendment's proscription against selective enforcement. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit rejected some of those claims. But it resurrected claims against King and his chief of staff, Michael Smedley—depriving them of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that inoculates state and local government officials from facing lawsuits if their alleged misconduct was not "clearly established" as illegal in prior case law. It also revived Fambrough's retaliation claim against the city.

As the 6th Circuit summarizes: King "says he received a phone call from a resident who complained about Fambrough's sound truck and someone else's box truck being parked in a residential area," so he told someone to take care of it. Scott Gardner, then the city's chief of police, "was concerned about selectively enforcing" the parking ordinance—which prohibits parking a truck in front of residential property, except for loading or unloading—because it is indeed almost never enforced. This was the beginning of a long pursuit, which ultimately saw a swarm of officers dispatched to Fambrough's house in August 2021 to confiscate the vehicle, allegedly resulting in $6,000 in damage. Fambrough also had to pay $528 in fees to get the damaged truck back.

"All the attention City officials gave Fambrough struck Gardner as unusual," the 6th Circuit notes. "The mayor's office wasn't this attentive even in homicide cases. And considering that the City had around only 50 police officers at the time and had 'serious crime problems,' Gardner thought it was odd to devote this much attention to permitting and parking issues." Based on available data, East Cleveland's violent crime rate is 1,409 per 100,000 residents, about four times higher than the national average.

Yet Gardner ultimately got on board. Smedley phoned him on August 9 "extremely upset," according to Gardner, and told the police chief he was "incompetent" for failing to "take care of" Fambrough's sound truck. Smedley wanted the "utmost enforcement as possible." So Gardner sent an email. "Please, find this vehicle and tow it," he wrote to all of ECPD. "Cite the operator with disturbing the peace and loud music. Please contact me as soon as this is complete to claim a surprise." A surprise!

Police succeeded. "On its face, the email told officers to tow Fambrough's truck regardless of whether it was parked illegally," writes the 6th Circuit. "And the Noise Ordinance authorizes seizure only of 'the sound device used,' and only upon conviction. So Gardner's instruction to tow the truck wasn't authorized by municipal law." The court still held that the seizure did not violate the Fourth Amendment. It also gave Gardner qualified immunity, ruling it is not clearly established that someone who acts as a conduit for someone else's alleged retaliation—which here came from the mayor's office—is a "responsible party."

Heather McCollough, the city's assistant law director, subsequently prosecuted Fambrough for allegedly violating the noise ordinance. According to a sworn declaration from Fambrough's attorney, McCollough outlined some of Fambrough's offenses on a call: that he "made complaints about the police department" and filed "public records requests," among other issues. Notably, it is legal to do those things. McCollough was typically willing to resolve minor noise complaints, she added, but not so much in this case, because Fambrough needed to "stand down." (He ultimately pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct, a reduced charge.)

"Only after [Fambrough] began supporting Gowdy's election was the weight of the law thrown against him," the 6th Circuit writes in its analysis of potential municipal wrongdoing. "And the City's police officers didn't uncover Fambrough's violations of their own accord. Instead, City decisionmakers sent them to Fambrough's home each time to enforce the Parking Ordinance. So the timing of the parking-related enforcement actions supports an inference that Fambrough's political speech was the motivating factor—as does the fact that the City rarely enforced the Parking Ordinance against anyone else despite having plenty of opportunities to do so." Incredibly, a photo of another truck can be seen down the street on the same day law enforcement came to fetch Fambrough's vehicle. (The law also includes pickup trucks, so the city arguably has a lot of enforcement to do if it sincerely believes this law matters.)

King allegedly set the chain of events into motion while Smedley took the driver's seat. "Smedley's pattern of incessantly calling and berating Gardner," the 6th Circuit adds, "clashes with the idea that Smedley was chiefly concerned with minor permitting, noise, or parking issues." After all, if that were true, why would the problem appear to begin and end with one person?

Over five years have passed since the ordeal. Although Fambrough is now potentially closer to getting in front of a jury, he has yet to actually state his case, still burdened by the onerous process government actors invoke to kill such suits before the community can assess the merits. King, meanwhile, won that election. He left office in May 2025, however, after he was found guilty of one count of theft in office, four counts of having an unlawful interest in a public contract, three counts of representation by public official or employee, one count of filing a false disclosure statement, and one count of soliciting improper compensation.

The post He Campaigned for the East Cleveland Mayor's Opponent. Then Police Came for His Truck. appeared first on Reason Magazine.