A Man Was Sentenced to Death on a Jailhouse Informant's Story

When guards moved Jim Daly onto Paul Skalnik's floor in the Pinellas County Jail, Daly looked around and said, "This is a damn setup."

Daly was awaiting trial for capital murder, and Skalnik was a fellow inmate housed on the same floor. Two days after Daly arrived, Skalnik told the lead investigator that Daly had confessed everything to him.

That claim would put Daly on death row. There was no physical evidence tying him to the killing, no forensic evidence, and no obvious motive. The state built its case around what Skalnik said Daly told him in jail.

The victim was 14-year-old Shelly Boggio, who had been found naked and stabbed more than 30 times at Indian Rocks Beach in Florida. Police had focused on Jack Pearcy, a 29-year-old who was last seen with her, who had blood on his shoes and had fled to Kansas. Questioned by police, Pearcy said he had driven Shelly to a lover's lane and waited in the car while his housemate Daly walked off with her, struggled with her, and stabbed her. There was no evidence to back up that account, but both men were charged with capital murder.

Pearcy went to trial first and was convicted but sentenced to life in prison. That outcome, journalist Pamela Colloff said, was "a political liability for the state attorney's office," which then had to try Daly with little more than Pearcy's unproven story.

Shortly afterward, lead investigator John Halliday went into the jail and pulled 15 men from their cells one by one to ask what Daly had said about his case. At least four of the men later remembered that newspaper articles describing the murder, with all the details someone would need to testify, were spread out in the interview room. Halliday denied it under oath. He left without a confession, but word spread through the jail that the case needed a snitch.

Skalnik supplied it. At trial, he gave the most extensive and detailed account among three jailhouse informants, inmates who claim a cellmate confessed to them and who often expect help with their own cases. He said he knew where the killing happened, who the victim was, and what she looked like. The centerpiece was Daly's supposed description of the killing itself: holding Shelly in his arms and stabbing her as she stared up at him and would not die. There was zero corroborating evidence for that image.

Daly sat stone-faced while Skalnik spoke. His lawyers had advised him to show no reaction, because jurors might read anger as a sign he could commit murder. He later said he was stunned that someone could tell falsehood after falsehood with the electric chair at stake.

The state's case had almost nothing else. Pearcy refused to testify and took the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. With no forensics, no motive, and no eyewitness, prosecutors relied on jailhouse testimony to fill the gap.

The jury convicted Daly of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death. At his sentencing hearing, Daly said the pursuit of convictions in Pinellas County had become "a win at all cost game" in which truth could be manipulated and paid liars could testify. Five days later, Skalnik was released. A parole memo said it was due to his cooperation in the murder trial. Daly's execution was put on hold in 2019 and he remains on death row.