Sunny Jacobs, sentenced to 17 years in a Florida prison, five of them in solitary confinement on death row, for a crime she didn’t commit, died earlier this month in a house fire in County Galway, Ireland.
Jacobs was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Florida for a murder she didn’t commit in 1976. She was 27 years old. She was separated from her two children, her 9-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter, and sent to solitary confinement on death row. She and her husband, Jesse Tafero, also sentenced to death, had been convicted of the murder of two police officers based on the testimony of the actual killer, who had made a plea bargain for three life sentences in exchange for his testimony against them.
Sunny spent five years in solitary confinement before her sentence was commuted to life. She then spent another 12 years in prison, during which time she lost her parents, her children went into foster care, and her husband, Jesse, was executed. She was imprisoned for 17 years before her release in 1992.
Shortly after her release, she met and married Peter Pringle, who was also wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Ireland. He was released in 1995 after his sentence was overturned. The two then founded the Sunny Center, a retreat for exonerees, on the West Coast of Ireland in 2014, opening their home as a healing center for the wrongly convicted from all over the world. Pringle died in 2022.