Pamela Coloff did the heavy lifting in a New York Times Magazine story. Now Jesse Wegman reminds us of it, as James Dailey’s stay of execution is about to run out, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has tired of hearing about it, so scheduling Dailey’s execution seems inevitable.

What Florida officials have so far refused to acknowledge . . . is that Mr. Dailey, 73, is almost certainly innocent.

Jesse gives two reasons for this conclusion. The first is that Dailey’s housemate, Jack Pearcy, was both convicted of the brutal 1985 murder of a teenager named Shelly Boggio, and asserted, twice, under oath, that he, and he alone, committed the murder. The second is that the only evidence against Dailey was the word of Paul Skalnik. Skalnik was the jailhouse snitch.

For those of us who do this for a living, there really isn’t much more that needs to be said about Skalnik. We all know the routine. We’ve all been through the routine, some of us a hundred times. We’ve argued that jailhouse snitches will say anything to weasel their way out of prison. We’ve argued that they’re the least credible people in the room, who would rat out their mother if it bought them a week off their sentence. We’ve argued the absurdity of a guy exposing his deepest criminal secret to a random stranger in a cell. We’ve argued this over and over.

Prosecutors believe jailhouse snitches because without them, they wouldn’t get their conviction. This might make it sound more cynical than it is, as most decent prosecutors start from a place of believing a defendant guilty and the snitch provides the evidence that seals the deal.

Prosecutors don’t believe they’re convicting an innocent person, even if they know they’re using the shoddiest evidence possible. They do so because they sincerely believe that their newest sleazeball best friend might be a lying sack of shit otherwise, but this time he’s giving testimony against the killer. The end justifies the means.

But despite all the points that Jesse finds “infuriating,” juries convict on the word of snitches all the time. Some snitches were part of the crime on trial, working their way out by claiming they’ve had a sudden epiphany, found Jesus and now testify to repent for their sins, so they can get out and do it all over again, the next time hopefully without getting caught. At least these snitches had a basis to claim actual knowledge of what went down, even if their story serves the cause of cutting them a break.

But the jailhouse snitch is the lowest and least credible snitch in the entire snitch ecosystem. We’ve known it forever. The media discovered it after they learned that they could get mileage out of true crime exoneration podcasts. Not to be mean to Jesse’s good intentions, but a few years ago, not a soul at the New York Times would have answered the phone if Dailey’s lawyer called with his story.

Not only would they not have been “infuriated,” or even slightly perturbed, but there’s a fair chance they would have been more inclined to write the story about how a saint like Paul Skalnik revealed Dailey’s killer heart, finally giving Shelly Boggio’s family “justice” and allowing her to rest in peace, knowing her true killer would get the punishment he deserved.

Jailhouse informants are some of the more elusive creatures of the criminal justice system — cycling in and out of jail, always seeming to find themselves in the right place when another inmate decides to unburden himself and confess his crimes to a total stranger. They can help destroy an innocent man’s life, and yet there is virtually no mechanism within the system to hold them, or the prosecutors who quietly use them, accountable.

What sort of “mechanism” would Jesse imagine should exist? There is no magic way to discern the liar from the truthful, even if journalists believe they know “truth” just as cops have always claimed. The failing of the jailhouse snitch is inherent in the beast, that he starts out as a guy in jail, and he’s not there on a research project, and happens upon some other miscreant who inexplicably unloads his worst secret on this unknown person because confession is good for the soul. Jurors love religious explanations. Reporters used to as well. They still do when it serves their truth.

This doesn’t mean the jailhouse snitch is a liar. Just because Skalnik was a con man, and later admitted that he was promised a deal (which the prosecution denied), creating the absurd conundrum of liar lying about lies but still credible enough to kill a guy over.

Pamela makes a persuasive case that Dailey may not have been the killer. Whether that meets the bar of “almost certainly innocent” is a stretch, but it flies over the bar of “not proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” such that he shouldn’t be in prison for the killing, where he’s been for about three decades. And where it appears likely that he’ll be executed.

The rank injustice of cases like James Dailey’s provide yet another reason, as if more were needed, that the death penalty must be abolished.

“Rank injustice” is the sort of plaintive cry that appeals to readers of Teen Vogue, but ignores the fact that it wasn’t just some nefarious abusive prosecutor who put this mutt Skalnik on the stand, but a jury of twelve compassionate citizens bought it. Nowhere does Jesse mention the jury. Then again, if the winds blew in a slightly different direction, the “rank injustice” would have been an acquittal because it let the murderer of a teenaged girl walk free. Maybe then the jury would have been mentioned.

But now that Dailey’s stay has run out and that the failings of this jailhouse snitch have received the New York Times Seal of Approval, what will Florida do?

As the last days of Mr. Dailey’s stay of execution run out, Governor DeSantis has shown no interest in revisiting the case. “This has been litigated over and over and over, and so at some point you need to do justice,” he said.

He is right — if not in the way he thinks. The power to do that justice is in his hands.

Doing “justice” is what everyone says they want, even if they can’t always agree on what that means. Jesse Wegman and Pamela Coloff are right about Dailey’s conviction based on a jailhouse snitch. Then again, that was the case back when Dailey was originally convicted, but back then, doing “justice” meant believing the jailhouse snitches and ignoring criminal defense lawyers telling journalists that they were the worst, least credible snitches of all snitches. Back then, they didn’t care. Now, they do.