Sunny Jacobs, a Celebrity After Freed From Death Row, Dies at 77

New York Times

a day ago

Sunny Jacobs, a former death row inmate who was convicted of a 1970s double murder in Florida and later freed, becoming a news media celebrity and a leading subject in an acclaimed Off Broadway play and two television movies, died on Tuesday in rural County Galway, Ireland. She was 77.
Her death was announced by the Sunny Center, an anti-death penalty nonprofit organization founded by Ms. Jacobs, with locations in Galway and Tampa, Fla. It said she had 'passed away after a fire at the Sunny Healing Center.' The circumstances of the fire were not immediately clear.
Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.
Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.
Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.
It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs's subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a '28-year-old vegetarian hippie,' as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.
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