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Irish Times
4 days ago
- Irish Times
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. [ Death row survivor Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs found 'tranquility' in Connemara before death in house fire Opens in new window ] 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? Listen | 18:42
Irish Times
4 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
Who was Sunny Jacobs? A remarkable life from Florida's death row to Connemara
Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs was 76 when she died on Tuesday morning in a house fire in Connemara . Her tragic death made headlines far beyond Galway and Ireland because Jacobs had led a truly remarkable life. It included a death row sentence for the murder of two policemen in Florida in 1976. She spent 17 years in a US jail, five in solitary confinement, before a deal with prosecutors saw her released in 1995. Another person died in the fire in the remote cottage, her carer a young man called Kevin Kelly from Moycullen. READ MORE Her life – before and after that highway shooting – has been chronicled in books, a play and a film as Jacobs became a campaigner against the death penalty. In an extraordinary twist of fate, a coincidence that could barely have been imagined, she ended up married to a man whose experience mirrored hers. [ Death row survivor Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs found 'tranquility' in Connemara before death in house fire Opens in new window ] Peter Pringle had also been handed the death sentence over his part in the murder of two policemen: gardaí John Morley and Henry Byrne during a bank robbery in Co Roscommon in 1980. After serving 15 years in jail, Pringle was acquitted of the killings in 1995 when the Court of Appeal ruled the original verdict was unsafe and unsound. The two former prisoners met in Ireland at an Amnesty event – Jacobs was a tireless campaigner for the rest of her life – and married in 2011 before settling in Connemara. Irish Times reporter Ronan McGreevy has been in Connemara where Jacobs found peace and sanctuary and where she died. He tells In the News her story. Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by John Casey.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Woman wrongly held for years on US death row dies in Irish house fire
After enduring hellish years on America's death row for a crime she did not commit, Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs found an idyll, and healing, in rural Ireland. But in a final, cruel twist, her sanctuary claimed her life. Jacobs, 78, and her carer, Kevin Kelly, were found dead on Tuesday after a fire at her cottage near the village of Casla, in County Galway. It was a tragic end to a remarkable life that was chronicled in books, a play and a film and made Jacobs a symbol of second chances and the campaign against capital punishment. Emergency services were alerted to the blaze at 6.19am and pronounced Jacobs and Kelly, a local man in his 30s, dead at the scene. Police are examining the bungalow to determine the cause of the fire. The news prompted grief and tributes from Jacobs' friends and supporters. 'Sunny was a fierce advocate for justice and a guiding light,' the Sunny Center Foundation, a nonprofit she founded that campaigns against wrongful convictions, said in a statement. 'Fair winds and full sails on your crossing, Sunny. Your memory is a blessing to us.' In 1976, Jacobs was a 28-year-old American hippy travelling in Florida with her 10-month-old daughter Christina, nine-year-old son Eric, and boyfriend Jesse Tafero, Christina's father. They accepted a lift from an acquaintance, Walter Rhodes, unaware he had a criminal record and had broken parole conditions. At a traffic stop, Rhodes shot dead two police officers and sped away with his passengers. He later surrendered, and in a plea deal he blamed the murders on Jacobs and Tafero, who were sentenced to death despite both maintaining their innocence. Rhodes later confessed to the murders, although he subsequently recanted. Tafero was executed in 1990. A malfunctioning electric chair meant it took several attempts and 13 minutes to kill him. Flames reportedly shot out of his head. Jacobs spent 17 years in prison, including five years in a tiny, windowless cell on death row and in solitary confinement, before being exonerated and released in 1992, aged 45. During her incarceration, her parents died in a plane crash, further traumatising her children. Christina was put into foster care and Eric, then in his mid-teens, supported himself as a pizza delivery boy. Jacobs sought to rebuild a bond with her children and to live without bitterness, drawing in part on the yoga and meditation that had sustained her in prison. In 1998 she visited Ireland to speak at an Amnesty International event and met Peter Pringle, a Dubliner who had been condemned to death and served 15 years in prison for the murder of two gardaí, John Morley and Henry Byrne, during a bank robbery, before the conviction was quashed and he was released. Jacobs married Pringle and lived with him in Galway's Irish-speaking Gaeltacht area. They grew vegetables, shared their home with dogs, cats, hens, ducks and goats and each published memoirs. Jacobs' story was included in a play, The Exonerated, that was performed in New York, Edinburgh and London and was turned into a film in 2005. She was played by actors such as Mia Farrow, Lynn Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Kathleen Turner, Brooke Shields and Marlo Thomas. Jacobs gave talks, set up the Sunny Center Foundation and, despite meagre income, shared an apparently happy life with Pringle. '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,' she told the Guardian in 2013. Pringle died in 2023, aged 84. In recent years Jacobs suffered from ill health and disability, but neighbours said she remained upbeat and mentally sharp in her adopted homeland. 'The stone in the west of Ireland makes me feel grounded; it anchors me,' Jacobs once told an interviewer.
BreakingNews.ie
7 days ago
- Health
- BreakingNews.ie
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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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." Ireland Timetable of case against former Armagh GAA captai... Read More 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.
Irish Times
7 days ago
- Health
- Irish Times
Woman who died in Connemara house fire named as former US death row inmate Sunny Jacobs
A woman who spent five years on death row in the United States is one of the victims of the fire in Connemara which killed two people. Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs spent 16 years in a Florida prison over the murder of two police officers. She was named locally in Connemara as a victim of the fire, along with a man in his 30s who has not yet been publicly identified. Jacobs was in a car with her partner Jesse Tafero and her two children, aged 9 years and 10 months, when she became caught up in a fatal shooting incident at an Interstate 95 rest stop in 1976. READ MORE Jacobs and Tafero were sentenced to death while a third man, Walter Rhodes, who was in the back seat of the car, later confessed to the murder. Tafero was executed in 1990. Ms Jacobs was eventually acquitted in 1992 and released from jail. On a visit to Ireland in 1998 while she was campaigning at an Amnesty International event for the abolition of the death penalty, she met Irishman Peter Pringle. He had been sentenced to death in Ireland for the murder o f gardas John Morley and Henry Byrne during a bank robbery in Ballaghaderreen in July 1980. His death sentence, along with that of two other men, was commuted to 40 years in jail. Mr Pringle was acquitted of the killing at the Court of Appeal in 1995 after the court ruled the original verdict was unsafe and unsound. The couple married in 2012 and they moved to Connemara. Mr Pringle died in 2023. In 2008, Ms Jacobs published the bestselling book Stolen Time about her period in jail. Tuesday' fire broke out at a cottage near Casla, a village between Inverin and Carraroe, at about 6am. 'At approximately 6:20am, gardaí and fire services were alerted to a house fire at Gleann Mhic Mhuireann,' An Garda Síochána said in a statement. 'The fire was brought under control by Fire Services and the bodies of a woman aged in her 70s and a man in his 30s were recovered from inside the house.' A forensic examination of the cottage, of which the two deceased are believed to have been the only occupants of at the time, is being carried out. The bodies have been transported to the University Hospital Galway mortuary to undergo postmortems and the coroner has been notified. 'The results of the postmortems, along with the findings of the technical examination, will determine the course of the Garda investigation,' the Garda added. Three units of the County Galway Fire Service and fire personnel from Galway city attended the scene. An Garda Síochána is appealing to anyone with information about the incident to contact Clifden Garda station on 095 22500, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or any garda station.
