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Boston Globe
09-06-2025
- 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
08-06-2025
- 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
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bridge Street Host Chat – Jazz Fest announces its return
(WSYR-TV) — Happy Friday! We start host chat with the breaking news that Jazz Fest is a go this year in Syracuse. Founder Frank Malfitano tells us that funding has come through, so this year's jazz fest can proceed June 25-29, around downtown and the SU Campus. Jazz Fest opens at clubs around downtown on Wednesday, June 25th. There will be three nights of headliners scheduled to take the Clinton Square Stage, Thursday through Saturday of that week. They'll wrap things up with a gospel/jazz program at Hendricks Chapel on Sunday the 29th. It's all free admission, as always, and Jazz Fest plans to announce the lineup on Monday morning. The group of headliners will include three Rock & Roll Hall-of-Famers and a couple of New Orleans legends. Host chat then wraps up with the latest NYS Fair concert clue, National Hug a Newsperson Day, and a fun game of Two Truths and a Lie in honor of Tell a Lie Day. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
