7 days ago
Woman who died in Galway house fire was a death row survivor wrongfully convicted of murder
A 76-year-old woman who died in a house fire in Galway has been named as Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs, who served 17 years in prison, including time on death row, after she was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a US policeman and a Canadian constable.
Ms Jacobs perished after a blaze broke out at her bungalow near Casla in Go Galway on Tuesday morning.
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A man in his 30s, who is understood to have been her carer, also died in the incident at Gleann Mhic Mhuireann.
Gardaí and the emergency services were alerted to the fire at 6:20am on Tuesday.
The bodies of the man and woman were recovered from inside the property. The scene has been preserved for a technical examination. Postmortem examinations will be carried out at University Hospital Galway.
Ms Jacobs was placed on death row in Florida in 1976 having been wrongfully convicted of a double murder.
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Her son was nine whilst her daughter was just 10 months old when she went to prison. When Sunny Jacobs was freed in 1992, her son Eric was a married father whilst her daughter Christina was 16 years old.
Ms Jacobs told the BBC in 2017 that when she went to jail when she was a 'mother, a daughter and a wife' and by the time she came out she was a 'grandmother, an orphan and a widow.'
Ms Jacobs and Jesse Joseph Tafero, the father of the younger of her two children, were tried separately, convicted, and sentenced to death by the same judge for the murders of two police officers at a rest stop off of Interstate 95 in Broward County, Florida in 1976.
Ms Jacobs and Mr Tafero had been travelling with their two young children Eric and Christina when their car broke down. They were trying to get home to North Carolina. A man Jesse knew called Walter Rhodes agreed to drive the couple and their children home.
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Sunny fell asleep with the children in the back seat, but was startled awake by a policeman knocking on the window of the parked car.
The officer was Philip Black, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper and his friend Donald Irwin a Canadian constable who was on holiday. She said that gunfire broke out and Black and Irwin were slain.
Jacobs and Tafero maintained from the beginning that Rhodes had shot the officers, and that they had nothing to do with it. Although there were two eyewitnesses to events surrounding the murders, neither contradicted Jacobs' and Tafero's version of what happened. Nor was their version contradicted by physical evidence.
Both Tafero and Rhodes had gunpowder residue on their hands, a fact that was consistent with Tafero's claim that Rhodes handed him the gun after shooting the officers. There was no gunpowder residue on Jacobs' hands.
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The convictions of Jacobs and Tafero rested primarily on the testimony of Rhodes, who was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In 1981, the Florida Supreme Court commuted the sentence of Ms Jacobs to life in prison. Mr Tafero was not so lucky. He was put to death in 1990.
After the execution, Mr Rhodes confessed he had fired the fatal shots confirming both Jesse's and Sunny's long-maintained innocence. Sunny was freed in 1992 when she was 45 years old.
Ms Jacob's subsquently met and married Peter Pringle in 2013. Mr Pringle had been sentenced to death in 1980 in Dublin for the murder of two gardaí, John Morley and Henry Byrne, in a bank raid in Ballaghaderreen in Roscommon.
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He served 15 years in jail before he was released in 1995 after his convictions for the July 1980 murders were deemed unsafe.
Following her release from prison Sunny Jacob's campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty. She met Mr Pringle at an Amnesty International event in 1998. He was also involved in advocacy work. Mr Pringle died on New Year's Eve 2022 at the age of 84.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper in 2013 Mr Pringle said that he was 'deeply touched' when he heard about the story of Ms Jacobs.
'I just had to talk to her. There was this spiritual connection there."
Ms Jacobs told the paper that she had to learn how to do things all over again when she was freed from prison in 1992.
'I had to learn how to make a living, be a mother and simply be a person again. It was very difficult, but at the same time I wanted to get past it.
I wouldn't say my experience haunts me, but it's always there. Everyone gets challenged in life and you can either spend the rest of your life looking backwards, or you can make a decision to keep going. That's the choice I made."
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While Ms Jacobs was in prison her parents, who looked after her children, died in a plane crash. She said that her focus was on rebuilding her relationship with her children once she was freed. In her Guardian interview she said that she had never expected to find love again.
"I'd given up on meeting anyone. I just accepted that not everyone was meant to have a partner. But then I met Peter."
The pair set up the Sunny Healing Centre in rural Connemara where they offered a space for healing and respite to individuals who had faced miscarriages of justice.
Ms Jacobs was also an author and spoke at universities and conferences. Oscar winning actress Susan Sarandon played Sunny in the movie 'The Exonerated' which was released in 2005.
