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Boston Globe
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Sunny Jacobs, a celebrity after freed from death row, dies at 77
Advertisement 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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, Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023. Advertisement A product of a prosperous Long Island family, Ms. Jacobs said she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as had Tafero, when the killings took place. Responsibility for them, she said, lay with another passenger in the car, Walter Rhodes, who had also been convicted of petty crimes and who later confessed to the killings of the two officers (though he subsequently recanted, confessed and recanted again, multiple times). Ms. Jacobs's 9-year-old son, Eric, and a baby daughter were also in the car, and they were left motherless by what she claimed was her unjust incarceration. Her story was retold in theater and on film. Off-Broadway, Mia Farrow, Jill Clayburgh, Lynn Redgrave, Stockard Channing, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields, and others have all portrayed her in 'The Exonerated,' a 2000 play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. It became a Court TV movie in 2005 starring Sarandon. Ms. Jacobs's story was also the basis of an earlier TV movie, 'In the Blink of an Eye' (1996). Barbara Walters once devoted a sympathetic segment to Jacobs on the ABC News program '20/20.' And Shields, along with actresses Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving, attended Ms. Jacobs's wedding to Pringle, in New York, at which Shields wept and said: 'Despite everything they have been through, they are not bitter or jaded. They never closed their hearts.' But the story was more complicated than the one that Ms. Jacobs fashioned over the years, and that was swallowed uncritically by media outlets and by the worlds of stage and screen. A young former reporter, Ellen McGarrahan, who had witnessed Tafero's execution for The Miami Herald and was haunted by it, spent much of the next 30 years digging into what had actually happened that day at the rest stop. She published her findings in a well-received 2021 book, 'Two Truths and a Lie.' Advertisement McGarrahan's meticulous, incisive research -- she left journalism to become a professional private investigator after witnessing the execution -- contradicts Ms. Jacobs's story on almost every point. Ms. Jacobs, Tafero, and Rhodes existed in a murky underworld of violence, drug dealing, gun infatuation, and petty crime, McGarrahan said she found. By the time of the fatal encounter with the Florida state trooper Phillip Black and his visiting friend, Canadian constable Donald Irwin, Ms. Jacobs's charge sheet was already long: arrests for prostitution, forgery, illegal gun possession, contributing to the delinquency of a minor (her then-4-year-old son, Eric), and drug dealing. After the killings, a loaded handgun was found in her purse. Several weapons -- two 9-mm semiautomatic handguns, a .38-caliber Special revolver, a .22-caliber Derringer, a .32-caliber revolver -- were found in the various cars linked to Tafero and Rhodes, McGarrahan wrote. Two eyewitnesses, truckers who were at the scene of the killings, said in court testimony that Rhodes couldn't have been the shooter because they saw that his hands were in the air. Forensic evidence suggested that a Taser shot, setting off the volley of fatal gunfire between the two parties, came from the back of the car, where Ms. Jacobs was sitting with her children. McGarrahan posits that Ms. Jacobs may have at least fired the Taser, which she had purchased months earlier. 'The state's theory was that Sunny fired the Taser and the gun at Trooper Black while he was attempting to subdue Jesse,' McGarrahan wrote, and that 'Jesse grabbed the gun from Sunny and continued firing at both Trooper Black and Constable Irwin.' Advertisement According to a Florida Supreme Court opinion in the case, as Ms. Jacobs was being led away after her arrest, a state trooper asked her, 'Do you like shooting troopers?' Ms. Jacobs was reported to have responded, 'We had to.' When McGarrahan went to find Ms. Jacobs at her home in Ireland many years later, 'a small, plump, wrinkled, gray-haired woman in an oversized green sweater, sweatpants, and wire-rimmed glasses' appeared in the doorway. Ms. Jacobs was wary, and mute on the subject of the Taser. When McGarrahan told her that she was simply seeking to establish the truth about the case, Ms. Jacobs responded: 'I don't think you can know that. I don't think that's knowable.' Sonia Jacobs -- who was also known as Sonia Leigh Linder, Sonia Lee Jacobs, and Sonia Lee Jacobs Linder, according to McGarrahan -- was born on Aug. 24, 1947, in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens. Her parents, Herbert and Bella Jacobs, owned a textile firm. Sunny, as she was known, grew up in Elmont on Long Island. She dropped out of college in 1965 and got married, with a wedding reception at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Manhattan, McGarrahan wrote. By 1968 -- the state of her marriage at that point is unclear -- she was living with her young son in Miami in a house owned by her parents. Her life, before and after meeting Tafero, was 'drugs, drugs and more drugs,' one informant told McGarrahan. Advertisement In 1982, after the Florida Supreme Court had overturned Ms. Jacobs's death sentence and commuted it to life in prison, her parents were killed that year in a Pan Am plane crash in New Orleans. When she was released 10 years later -- the US Court of Appeals ordered that she be given a new trial, but prosecutors offered a plea deal instead -- Ms. Jacobs had already been the subject of the '20/20' segment. In the years that followed, she taught yoga and became increasingly sought after as a speaker for her views opposing the death penalty. She moved to Ireland sometime in the 2000s. In 2007, she published her autobiography, 'Stolen Time: One Woman's Inspiring Story as an Innocent Condemned to Death.' Facebook messages to her children, Eric Linder and ChrisTina Pafero, were not immediately answered. McGarrahan, reflecting on the saga that she had spent so many years uncovering, said in an interview that with Ms. Jacobs, 'the myth has become the truth.' 'She made herself into the victim,' McGarrahan added. 'It removes the actual victims.' This article originally appeared in
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Irish Independent
Obituary: Sunny Jacobs, US campaigner who fought against the death penalty after her own experience of spending five years on death row
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.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Woman Who Spent 17 Years in Prison After Being Wrongfully Convicted of Murder Dies in House Fire
American Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, who spent 17 years in jail for murders she did not commit, has died after a fire broke out in her cottage in Ireland She and her boyfriend were wrongly convicted after two police officers were fatally shot in Florida in 1976 After her release in 1992, Jacobs, whose story was captured in books and films, advocated for the abolishment of the death penaltyAn American woman who spent almost two decades in prison for murders she did not commit has died after a fire broke out in her home in Ireland. Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs, 78, and Kevin Kelly were found dead on Tuesday, June 3, after her cottage caught fire in a village in County Galway, the Garda, the local police force, said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. Kelly was her caretaker, according to her nonprofit, The Sunny Center Foundation. Emergency responders arrived after they received an alert about the fire at 6:19 a.m. local time and found both people dead at the scene. An investigation is ongoing, and the bodies were taken to University Hospital Galway's mortuary, police added. 'The results of the postmortems, along with the findings of the technical examination, will determine the course of the Garda investigation,' the department said. The Chief Fire Officer of Galway Fire and Rescue Services did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's requests for comment. The deadly fire is a heartbreaking ending to a life besieged by challenges. In 1976, Jacobs was a 28-year-old mother of two young children when she and her boyfriend, Jesse Tafero, decided to catch a ride with Tafero's acquaintance, Walter Rhodes, in Florida, The Guardian reported. During the car ride, Rhodes fatally shot two police officers and blamed the murders on Jacobs and Tafero, who were both sentenced to death, according to the outlet. While Tafero died after a botched execution in 1990, Jacobs, the mother of his child, spent five of her 17 years in prison on death row, the paper reported. Jacobs was freed after an appeal court resulted in a new trial, and she accepted a plea deal in 1992, according to The Irish Times. After the murders, Rhodes admitted to shooting the officers, although he later retracted his confession, The Guardian reported. Jacobs wasn't the only one to suffer. Her children, 10-month-old daughter Christina, nine-year-old son Eric, were in the car that life-altering day in 1976. After her arrest, they were raised by Jacobs' parents until the latter died in a plane crash, according to the paper. Despite her family's trauma, Jacobs was determined to live a life of positivity. She built a platform campaigning against the death penalty. 'It was very important, that choice I made to heal, rather than to spend the gift of a new life that I had looking backwards at the wrongs that were done to me,' Jacobs told the Times in 2006. 'And I was able to share that with my children. It meant I am leaving them a legacy of hope and strength rather than defeat and pain.' In 2012, she married Irishman Peter Pringle, whom she had met in 1998 while making an appearance at an Amnesty International event, the paper reported. They bonded over their shared history. Pringle, who died in 2023, was acquitted of the murder of two police officers during a robbery in County Roscommon in 1980, the Times reported. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Jacobs' story was captured in her 2008 memoir, Stolen Time, and films, including an international play, The Exonerated, which was adapted into a movie starring Susan Sarandon. She and her late husband created the nonprofit to support other people who have been wrongfully convicted. 'We are all doing life wherever we are,' she said, according to the foundation. 'Every day must be lived to the fullest under the prevailing conditions, with an eye toward betterment. In other words, don't wait until conditions are ideal, because you may never get there.' Read the original article on People
The Journal
03-06-2025
- Health
- The Journal
Woman who died in house fire was a death row survivor who had been married to man wrongfully convicted of murder
LAST UPDATE | 11 mins ago 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 this morning. A man in his thirties, 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 today. 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. Her son was nine whilst her daughter was just ten month 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. 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 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 Jacobs subsequently 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. 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.' 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 Examiner
03-06-2025
- Health
- Irish Examiner
Woman killed in Galway fire named as former death row inmate Sunny Jacobs
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. Jacobs perished after a blaze broke out at her bungalow near Casla in Co Galway on Tuesday. 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. The bodies of the man and woman were recovered from inside the property. The scene has been preserved for a technical examination and autopsies will be carried out at University Hospital Galway. Jacobs was placed on death row in Florida in 1976, having been wrongfully convicted of a double murder. Her son was nine and her daughter was just 10 months old when she went to prison. When freed in 1992, her son Eric was a married father, while her daughter Christina was 16. 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.' 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 Interstate 95 in Broward County, Florida in 1976. The pair had been travelling with their children, Eric and Christina, when their car broke down. They were trying to get home to North Carolina. A man Tafero knew named Walter Rhodes agreed to drive the couple and their children home. 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 gunfire broke out and Mr Black and Mr Irwin were killed. 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. 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 Jacobs to life in prison. Tafero was put to death in 1990. Peter Pringle and Sunny Jacobs who married in 2013. File picture: Andrew Downes After the execution, Rhodes confessed he had fired the fatal shots, confirming both Jacobs' and Tafero's long-maintained innocence. Jacobs was freed in 1992 when she was 45 years old. She subsequently 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. 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, Jacobs 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. 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. Jacobs was also an author and spoke at universities and conferences. Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon played her in the movie The Exonerated, which was released in 2005. Read More Ellen McGarrahan and the search for truth following a grisly execution
