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Trading cellmates' confessions for probation
The jail phone
About a year after the divorce notice ran, Skalnik was married again and back in jail, this time in Pinellas County, Florida, for scamming a woman he had been having an affair with. One hot summer day he went to the bank of phones in the jail and called the state attorney's office with information. Prosecutors came to meet him, and he began filling in the blanks in low-level drug cases against men awaiting trial, giving them what they needed for a conviction.
Common practice
He was no outlier. Detectives had the run of the Pinellas County Jail then and could come in as they pleased to ask men, mostly held before trial and presumed innocent, what their cellmates had told them. Nobody spelled it out, but the men facing very long sentences understood that helping prosecutors would be rewarded.
The reward
Skalnik was facing five years. After he brought in his confessions, he was only given probation. Less than five months after his release, he was arrested again for theft.
How do informants earn shorter sentences?
Prosecutors control which charges to file and what sentence to recommend, so they can reward a defendant for helping with another case. Because the reward depends on the prosecutor's judgment of the help given, a witness has a reason to make the help as valuable as possible. Federal courts formalize the practice: section 5K1.1 of the federal sentencing guidelines lets a judge sentence below the usual range when prosecutors report that the defendant gave substantial assistance.
Why do so many jail inmates await trial?
Jails hold people arrested and waiting for their cases to resolve, along with some serving short sentences, while prisons hold people convicted of longer terms. Many defendants stay in jail before trial because they cannot post bail or because a judge denies release. Cases can take months or years to reach trial. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly two-thirds of the people in U.S. local jails in recent years had not been convicted.
How can an informant learn a case's details?
Details of a crime can reach a jail from newspaper coverage, court papers passed between inmates, and conversations about the case on the cellblock. Investigators test a claimed confession by checking whether it includes details that were not public and that only the culprit would know. A 1990 report by a Los Angeles County grand jury that investigated jailhouse informants described how an informant could telephone from the jail while posing as an official and obtain details of a case.
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