Time for Fla. to re-examine death penalty

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TALLAHASSEE - From the moment he confessed, there was little doubt that Richard Cooper should spend the rest of his life in prison for his part in a Pinellas County triple murder. The real question was how long that life would be. Cooper, 40, will complete his 20th year on death row next month and yet he is nowhere near to running out of appeals. His case is a classic example of what's wrong with Florida's death penalty. The problem, some would say, is simply that it's too slow. That is partly true. It is barbaric to keep people in a cage for 15 or 20 years and then kill them. It shouldn't be too swift, either, because that's how big mistakes get made. There might be a proper balance if the system weren't so glutted with dubious cases like Cooper's.

Four people took part in the planned robbery and impromptu murder of three men at their High Point home in 1982. The ringleader, somewhat older than the others, was Jason Dirk Walton. It was Walton who ordered the victims killed because one of them had recognized him. Of the four, only Walton and Cooper are on death row. The third cut a deal for his testimony and got life. The fourth was sentenced to death, but he got life on appeal because of a procedural error by the trial judge. Problem: unequal justice.

A bigger problem is that the death sentences for Cooper, who had committed no known crimes before that one, depended hugely on the searing testimony of a jailhouse snitch, Paul Skalnick, who told the jury, in the penalty phase of Cooper's trial, that Cooper had bragged to him about the crime having been confused with a Mafia killing, that he had bad-mouthed the dead men, that "he didn't care one way or another" about what he had done, and that he was counting on his age and his "little baby face" to escape the death penalty.

That would have been enough for any jury. If there was any surprise, it was that Cooper's voted for death in the three cases 7-5, 7-5 and 9-3. In most of the 37 other death penalty states, and under federal law, anything less than a unanimous recommendation automatically means life.

Cooper's jury obviously had concerns with Skalnick. Jailhouse snitches are always problematic because they are, by definition, people who have done their own bad things that they might be trying to lie their way out of. It ought to be against the law for a judge or jury to base any verdict on the uncorroborated word of a jailhouse snitch.

And Skalnick wasn't just any old snitch. He was amazingly prolific. Fellow inmates somehow just couldn't help spilling their guts to him. During several different spells in the Pinellas County jail totaling nearly two years, he informed in at least 33 cases and helped convict nine men of murder.

Skalnick is a former Texas cop who became a private investigator and also a professional liar - a "con man extraordinaire," according to the arrest documents in one of his Pinellas County scams, involving the swindling of a widow. Skalnick later went back to Texas, where he served time for the sexual assault of a child. More recently, he was facing charges in Massachusetts for posing as a lawyer to swindle the families of other defendants, for ducking a $3,000 hotel tab and for failing to register as a sex offender.

The state of Florida contends that Cooper would have been condemned without Skalnick's testimony. Maybe, but courts aren't supposed to speculate. Legally, there are several strong arguments for throwing out his testimony and setting a new sentencing hearing for Cooper.

One is that he was in effect an agent of the state when they put him in a cell with Cooper. The Florida Supreme Court blew this off, rather too casually, in denying Cooper's habeas corpus appeal last year.

An even stronger allegation is that one of the lawyers who defended Cooper at trial had once represented Skalnick, albeit briefly, and because of the inherent conflict pulled his punches at a pretrial hearing on whether to suppress Skalnick's testimony. He asked Skalnick only about his snitching during his current time in jail, leading the judge to believe it was the first time he had snitched. The Supreme Court ducked that one too, on the premise that it didn't matter.

Cooper's volunteer lawyers, headed by Stephen F. Hanlon, a pro bono specialist at Holland & Knight, are now appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court. If they lose, there would still be another avenue left.

This case could have been over years ago if Hanlon hadn't had a long, losing fight to see voluminous sealed documents bearing on Skalnick's career as a snitch. With so much that's so wrong about this case it's hard to understand why the state isn't willing to settle for three life sentences. It's not as if there aren't worse people on death row, people whose juries were unanimous for death.

Florida is at a turning point on the death penalty. There have been only nine new death sentences in each of the last two years, compared to an average of 22 for 1996-2000. It is too soon to know all the reasons why. But one of them, surely, is greater awareness that the alternative is now life without parole. For all but the worst of the worst, that should suffice.

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