Sunny jacobs son eric
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Stolen Time: One Woman's Inspiring Story As an Innocent Condemned to Death
'In a world of one, I am alone, more alone than I have ever been in my life. Locked up in a box within a box where no one can enter and I cannot leave. I am to await my death.' In 1976 a twenty-eight-year-old mother of two and her partner were wrongfully sentenced to death by the Florida courts for the murder of two police officers. Sunny Jacobs would not taste freedom again for seventeen years, by which time her two children were estranged, her parents were dead and her beloved partner, Jesse Tafero, had been executed. Sunny spent five years on death row in solitary confinement. In a cell the width of her arm-span, her only lifeline was the stream of letters between herself and Jesse, offering love and strength, each echoing the other's conviction that the truth would soon be revealed. She refused to lose hope, even though the state had allowed falsified testimonies to condemn her and Jesse, disregarding hidden evidence and the true murderer's confession. Then in 1981 Sunny's sentence was reduced
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‘I had nothing… The world I left no longer existed’
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG
July 4, 1999
© St. Petersburg Times
Main story
‘We’d rather have died than to stay in that place for something we didn’t do’
‘I had nothing … The world I left no longer existed’
‘We don’t look back’
‘Yes, I’m angry.… Yes, I’m bitter. I’m frustrated’
‘The stigma is always there’
The 13 other survivors and their stories
When Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs went to prison for murder in 1976, her son was 9. Her daughter, 10 months old, was still nursing.
When she was freed in 1992, her son was married with a child of his own and her daughter was a 16-year-old stranger.
“Getting back family is the hardest part,” says Jacobs, now 51, who teaches yoga and lives in Los Angeles. “They live with embarrassment for so long: You say you didn’t (commit the murder), but everyone says you did.”
Fresh out of prison, Jacobs made her first non-collect telephone call in 16 years to s
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In 1976, Sunny Jacobs, a white woman, was sentenced to death for killing two police officers in Florida. She spent five years in isolation on Florida’s Death Row and 17 years in a maximum-security prison before her conviction was overturned and she was finally released.
Sunny, her partner Jesse Tafero, and their two children were on vacation when they had car trouble and accepted a ride home from Walter Rhodes, who was on probation.
While they were at a rest stop on the Florida Interstate, two police officers approached the car to do a routine license and registration check and someone in the car shot them. Sunny stated that she was in the back seat of the car shielding her children and did not see what had happened.
The state charged all three adults with the murders. Gunpowder tests showed that Rhodes had fired a weapon; tests of Sunny and Jesse were inconclusive. Rhodes told the prosecutors that Sunny and Jesse had killed the officers and agreed to testify against them in exchange for a life sentence. Rhodes took a polygraph test, which the prosecutor claimed he passed, and
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