Former Florida death row prisoner Sunny Jacobs dies in house fire in Ireland
In early 1976, Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs and her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, were charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Their co-indictee Walter Rhodes “agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges and to testify against Tafero and Jacobs.”1 Jacobs and Tafero were tried separately and maintained their innocence.
Tafero was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death. A video of Tafero speaking about his trial while incarcerated on Florida’s death row is available from Florida Memory: State Library and Archives of Florida here. He said, “I didn’t get a fair trial at all.” And he said he doubts “very seriously” that the death penalty is reserved for people who commit the worst crimes. He said Florida’s death penalty is “a very discriminatory situation. . . . Poor people get the death penalty.”
Tafero was ultimately executed on May 4, 1990, in one of Florida’s worst botched executions by electrocution. According to a post from the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, “Officials interrupted the execution three times because flames and smoke shot out of his head. During the first interruption, he continued to move and breathe.” The Death Penalty Information Center reports that “six-inch flames erupted from Tafero’s head, and three jolts of power were required to stop his breathing.”
Jacobs was also convicted on all counts. The jury recommended a sentence of life, but the trial court sentenced Jacobs to death on jury override.2
According to a statement from Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP) this week, “When Sunny went to prison, her son was 9. Her daughter was only 10 months old and still nursing.” A 2006 article from The Guardian reported:
During the first five years of her incarceration, spent on death row, not a single person had spoken to her. Prison guards were forbidden to talk or even make gestures in her direction. She was denied a mirror and used to confirm her continued existence to herself by peering into a metal button used to release drinking water.
. . . .
She found a way through the endless days of solitary on death row by practising the yoga and meditation she had learned as a teenager and when she was released began to teach it.
In March 1981, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed Jacobs’ convictions but overturned her death sentence, finding that “the evidence is not sufficient to override the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence.” The case was remanded for resentencing. Jacobs spent five years on Florida’s death row before being resentenced.
Ultimately, according to The Guardian, Jacobs “was granted a new trial in 1992 and freed with time served after accepting a plea deal.” After being released from prison, she moved to rural Ireland. The book Two Truths and a Lie is written about Jacobs and Tafero’s case. Jacobs’ story is also part of The Exonerated: A Play.
In 1994, according to The Guardian, “Rhodes was released from prison, having been paroled for good behaviour. He had earlier admitted on several occasions that he had lied about his involvement in the murders.”
In 2011, Sunny married Peter Pringle, an Irish death row exoneree, who she met in 1988 at an Amnesty International event.3 In 2012, Jacobs and Pringle “began welcoming exonerees into their home in 2012.”4 In 2014, they established “the Sunny Center, a non-profit that assisted exonerees with reintegration and readjustment to life outside the prison.”
Together, they opened the Sunny Healing Center in Ireland and the Sunny Living Center in Tampa, as well as expanded their organization’s services to aid the famiy and friends of those wrongfully convicted. This work continued after Peter’s death in 2022, and the Sunny Living Center has served as home to several of Florida’s death row exonerees, including . . . Clemente Aguirre.5
You can view the Sunny Living Center website here. The website that the Center was opened in 2018 and “is a dedicated Community in Tampa, Florida, for Exonerees to live safely, securely and affordably.”
This week, Jacobs and her caregiver passed away in a fire at her cottage in Ireland. A statement on the Sunny Living Center website about Jacobs’ passing says: “We don’t have many details at this time, but investigation is ongoing and our contacts in Galway are providing us with information as it comes in.”
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Jacobs v. State, 396 So. 2d 713, n.1 (Fla. 1981).
Id. at 718.
Carry Sunny Jacobs’ Legacy Onward, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (June 3 2025), https://www.fadp.org/carry-sunny-jacobs-legacy-onward/.
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What a story. And FL criminal justice system is worse now than then.
May God have mercy on her soul, as well as on Jesse Tafero. 49 years of horrible yclept American justice at work. An obvious example of how large the death-penalty carbuncle exists on the face of Justice in this country. God help us all. I will pray for both of them; so should we all.