The life and tragic death of Sunny Jacobs: how a US death row exoneree ended up in Connemara
An isolated cottage in
Connemara
is as far away as one can imagine from an interstate truck stop in suburban Miami, but Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs could not escape tragedy in either location.
There was shock at home and abroad on Tuesday when news broke that Jacobs (77)
died in a house fire
at her home in Glenicmurrin in Casla – a village in Connemara,
Co Galway
– along with her caretaker Kevin Kelly (31) in the early hours of that morning.
Jacobs, who was originally from New York, had, by her own admission, become a 'poster child' for the worldwide lobby of those opposed to the death penalty, having spent five years on death row in the 1980s.
Her life story has been told many times over.
READ MORE
It featured in a TV drama, In the Blink of an Eye (1996), and in a stage play, The Exonerated (2000), which was turned into a film in 2005 of the same name where she was played by Susan Sarandon.
Her story was also told in a documentary, The Sunny Side Up (2019), her own book, Stolen Time (2007), and a book by former Miami Herald journalist Ellen McGarrahan entitled Two Truths and a Lie (2021).
Sonia Lee Jacobs Linder was born in August 1947 to Herbert and Bella Jacobs, a wealthy Jewish couple from Long Island, New York. Her parents were hard-working textile merchants, but Jacobs didn't live up to their expectations.
She became pregnant as a teenager, leading to a quick marriage to the father of her child, followed by a swift divorce. When her son Eric was two, Jacobs moved to Florida where her parents kept a home. They looked after her child.
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Death row survivor Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs found 'tranquility' in Connemara before death in house fire
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It was there she met Jesse Tafero, a charmer, but also a violent criminal. At the time, she was a 'hippy flower girl' and a vegetarian. Tafero was her biggest mistake. They had a daughter, Tina, together.
On February 20th, 1976, Jacobs, Tafero, her two children and a fugitive named Walter Rhodes pulled over at a rest stop on Interstate 95, the highway that runs the length of the east coast of the United States. Rhodes had agreed to drive the couple and the children from Miami to a house in West Palm Beach farther north along the coast in Florida.
They were all asleep in the car when a passing highway patrolman, Phillip Black, spotted a gun on the floor of the car. He ordered Rhodes and Tafero out of the car. Shortly afterwards, Black and a visiting Canadian police officer, Corporal Donald Irwin, were shot dead.
Rhodes testified that Tafero and Jacobs shot the two police officers. They were sentenced to death and he, as the chief witness, was spared the electric chair. He later changed his testimony several times and admitted to the killing.
Jacobs spent five years in solitary confinement on death row. Her death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1981. Tafero went to the electric chair in 1990 in a notoriously botched execution in which flames projected from his head. It took an agonising 13 minutes for him to die.
Sunny Jacobs admitted to making mistakes in her early life, mistakes for which she paid a terrible price, but never admitted to murder or even being party to murder. Photograph: Joe O'Shaughnessy
Two years later, Jacobs won her appeal against her sentence and was released from prison after 16 years and 233 days, but there was a sting in the release. Rather than seeking a retrial, which the Florida state prosecutors were entitled to do, they entered into a special plea bargain known as an Alford plea. Jacobs did not admit guilt, but admitted the prosecutors had incriminating evidence against her. She would later state that she agreed to this plea under duress.
The state of Florida was reluctant to admit it made a mistake in convicting her, she believed, as this would leave them open to paying her compensation.
In her book Stolen Time, Jacobs recalled spending five years in solitary confinement because there was no death row for women. Her coping mechanisms would serve her well both in prison and when she was released.
'The work that had begun in my death row cell, which I had expanded into my everyday life in prison through yoga, meditation and prayer, now became a way of life and a paradigm for living in the world,' she wrote.
She toured the world campaigning against the death penalty. It was while speaking at an event in Galway in 1998 that she met her future husband, Peter Pringle. Pringle, like Jacobs, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He was arrested and convicted of the capital murders of two gardaí, John Morley and Henry Byrne, who were shot dead by a republican paramilitary gang during a bank robbery in Ballaghaderreen , Co Roscommon, in July 1980. He was sentenced to death along with two other men. Their death sentences were commuted in 1981 by then president Patrick Hillery to penal servitude for 40 years.
Pringle, though a known republican who had spent time in jail, always claimed he was not involved in the murders and was nowhere near the scene at the time. In 1995, his conviction was deemed to be unsafe and unsound by the Court of Appeal and he was released.
He attended Jacobs's 1998 talk in Salthill and she noticed that he was crying during her presentation. They agreed to go for a cold water swim afterwards and fell in love.
Sunny Jacobs and her husband Peter Pringle in Connemara, Co Galway, in 2012. Photograph: Joe O'Shaughnessy
'I was 51 years old, in the sixth year of my new life when I met someone with whom I found the deep connection I had been seeking all my life. I hadn't been trying because I don't think I could ever find anyone to live with again,' she wrote in Stolen Time.
They eventually married in New York in 2011. They lived in a number of houses in Connemara before settling in a three-bedroom cottage Glenicmurrin with views of the Twelve Pins mountains.
'Life has turned out beautifully,' Pringle told the Guardian in 2013.
'Sure, it's not without its difficulties. We have no money. But we do good work. We are at peace. And we have a great life together. We look forward and we live in the moment.'
McGarrahan, the former Miami Herald journalist who wrote a book about Jacobs, was one of the witnesses to the execution of Tafero and was haunted by what she saw. She resolved to get to the truth of what happened on the layby of Interstate 95, given the many different versions of the truth.
She concluded Tafero murdered the two policemen, but that Jacobs was not altogether innocent and had fired a taser gun from the back seat, which started the whole tragedy.
Having reviewed the evidence, she concurred with the presentence hearing that she and Tafero had lived the 'classic fugitive lifestyle'.
'These individuals simply moved from place to place exchanging narcotics for whatever was available, and living from hand to mouth, day to day,' she wrote.
That was then.
Jacobs admitted to making mistakes in her early life, mistakes for which she paid a terrible price, but never admitted to murder or even being party to murder.
Her husband Pringle died in 2023 at the age of 84. He had been looked after in his final years by Kelly, who also became Jacobs's carer, and who is originally from Moycullen, Co Galway. He was a dog lover who was involved with the local Madra charity.
While Jacobs and Pringle lived in Connemara, many exonerees from around the world came to stay and avail of their hospitality. According to Ruairí McKiernan, a friend of Jacobs's, she lived a full life until she died, constantly advocating for victims of injustice.
The rough boreen up to her house in Glenicmurrin was closed off this week by gardaí as forensic examinations of her cottage took place.
It was a tragic end for a woman who had snatched happiness from one of the worst situations imaginable.
Death in Connemara: who was Sunny Jacobs?
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