Obituary: Sunny Jacobs, US campaigner who fought against the death penalty after her own experience of spending five years on death row

Irish Independent

4 days ago

An advocate for those given wrongful convictions, she ran a foundation and sanctuary from her home in Casla with her late husband, Peter Pringle.
She was born in Queens and grew up in a Jewish family in Elmont, New York. She went to college at 16, but dropped out when she became pregnant. Her son Eric Stuart was born just before her 19th birthday and she married his father, Kenny, but the relationship did not last.
As she wrote in her autobiography, Stolen Time, she met Jesse Tafero in 1973 when she was 24 and a 'flower child' living in Miami with her son.
She wrote that she didn't know initially about Tafero's criminal past – he was given parole for a conviction of assault with intent to commit rape and robbery.
The events that followed have been investigated by Ellen McGarrahan, author of Two Truths and a Lie (2021), who was sent as a reporter to Tafero's execution.
McGarrahan has written about the couple's involvement in drugs and their association with an organised crime work known as the 'Dixie mafia'.
Their daughter, Christina, was 10 months old and her son, Eric, was nine when she and Tafero took a 160km lift from Walter Rhodes, to Florida.
They had pulled over for a rest stop when two police officers approached, saw a gun and asked Rhodes, who was on parole, to step out. The two officers were shot dead, and she wrote that Rhodes forced the couple and their children into the patrol car and sped off before being caught.
McGarrahan's investigation quotes eye witnesses who said shots came from the back of the car.
All three adults were arrested and Rhodes subsequently testified against Tafero and Jacobs, who were sentenced to death. Rhodes later confessed to the murders, but then recanted several times.
Eric was held in a juvenile detention centre in Florida for two months, while Christina was taken into foster care for two weeks before Jacobs's parents secured custody of both.
Jacobs was placed in solitary confinement as there was no 'death row' for women. She wrote about living in a 'world of one', where she could measure just six steps between the toilet and the steel door and she had no natural light.
In 1981, her sentence was converted from death to life imprisonment by the Florida Supreme Court. However, in July 1982 her parents, who had been raising her children, were among 153 people killed in the Pan Am flight 759 crash in Kenner, Louisiana.
Christina was placed in foster care while Eric left school and began working. He had already developed a stutter from the trauma of his two months' detention after the shooting in 1976.
Jacobs maintained a relationship with Tafero through correspondence, and learnt that men on death row had greater privileges. She filed a lawsuit that gave her access to two books a week and four hours a week out of her cell under supervision.
She said she set herself a goal of becoming the best person she could possibly be, doing 'yoga, prayer, push-ups and sit-ups, and with mathematical tasks'. Jacobs was allowed a 10-minute phone conversation with Tafero in May 1990 before his botched execution by electric chair. It took him 13 minutes to die in horrifying circumstances.
Two years later, an appeals court overturned Jacobs's 1976 murder conviction and ordered a new trial, but she was released from prison under a deal known as the Alford plea.
In her book, she wrote that this was a 'plea of convenience', which would 'allow them to read an adjudication of guilt of a lesser degree into the record to prevent me from being able to sue for false imprisonment or whatever later'.
She was 45 and tired and just wanted to be with her children and her first grandchild, she wrote.
The Irish Independent has seen court transcripts indicating Jacobs understood she was pleading guilty to the second degree murders of the officers and the kidnapping of an elderly man.
Jacobs moved to Los Angeles and began a global campaign against the death penalty. She suffered injuries when she was hit by a car that left her with chronic mobility issues.
She met Pringle at an Amnesty International event in Ireland in 1998. Pringle, who served time in prison in the early 1960s for being a member of the IRA, had been sentenced to death for the murder of gardaí John Morley and Henry Byrne during a bank robbery in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, in July 1980.
His death sentence, along with that of two other men, was commuted to 40 years in jail. He was released after 15 years when the Court of Appeal ruled the original verdict was unsafe and unsound and ordered a retrial that never happened.
Pringle and Jacobs formed a relationship, and she moved to Connemara to live with him and their dogs, cats, hens, ducks and goats. They created the Sunny Center Foundation, welcoming people who had been wrongfully imprisoned and helping them to return to society.
'The greatest tool is forgiveness,' she told The New York Times in 2019.
'If you hold on to that anger and resentment, then there's no room for happiness and love in your heart, and you start destroying your own life.'
Their marriage in New York in November 2011 made the 'weddings' section of The New York Times, with Brooke Shields, Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving among those present.
All three actors had by then played Jacobs during various productions of The Exonerated, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, about six people wrongfully imprisoned.
After Pringle died on New Year's Eve 2022, the debate over his innocence reopened, with an article by investigative journalist Michael Clifford in The Examiner. Retired garda detective Tom Connolly also produced recordings to support his firm belief that Pringle was the third man in the Co Roscommon robbery.
Speaking to Joe Duffy on RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline, Jacobs said that details of wrongful conviction cases 'can never be resolved… and that's how it is in most cases'.
She continued her own advocacy work up until very recently, in spite of her health challenges.
Dr Edward Mathews, director of the Irish Innocence Project at Griffith College, described her as 'a lifelong campaigner for human rights and the abolition of the death penalty, speaking all over the world of how the death penalty invariably kills the innocent and debases the whole of humanity'.
Close friend Ruairí McKiernan said: 'Sunny travelled the world, often in her wheelchair, tirelessly advocating against the death penalty, with recent speaking engagements in Paris and Strasbourg. She was driven not by anger, but by love.'
Jacobs, who was predeceased by partner Tafero and husband Pringle, is survived by her daughter Christina, son Eric and grandchildren Claudia, Jesse and Bella.