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Thread: Sonia Jacobs - Florida

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Marriage of two former Death Row inmates, one Irish, one American

    A couple who served time on Death Row, one in Ireland, one in America were married last week in New York and will live in Ireland.

    Peter Pringle, 74, was sentenced to death in Ireland for the 1980 capital murder of two policemen during a bank raid in Ballaghaderreen County Roscommon.

    The robbery was said to have been carried out by the Irish National Liberation Army a radical offshoot of the IRA.

    His execution was set for June 8 1981 but was commuted by the Irish president.

    He served 15 years before it was discovered that his original conviction was unsafe after evidence was produced showing his ‘confession’ was written down even before he was interviewed.

    During his work with Amnesty International highlighting innocent death row victims he met Sunny Jacobs.

    Sonia Jacobs, 64, was arrested after a February 1976 shootout with two policemen in Florida in which the officers were killed.

    Jacobs and her husband had been passengers in the car driven by Walter Rhodes Junior when it was pulled over by police. Both Rhodes and Jacobs. Husband Jesse Tafero had prior convictions.

    Rhodes turned evidence and claimed it was Jacobs and Tafero who had shot and killed the policemen. A jailhouse informant also told the court that Jacobs had told him she was involved.

    Jacobs also received the death sentence and her husband was eventually executed in 1990.

    She however, won her case on appeal after the jailhouse informant recanted and it became clear that it was Walter Rhodes who had fired the fatal shots and she was freed after seventeen years in jail.

    She and Pringle began seeing each other and often spoke at conferences on the death penalty together.

    “We didn’t just share a past, we had a vision for a future,” . Jacobs told The New York Times, which featured their wedding “Sure, Peter and I were also physically attracted to one another, but it was deeper than that,” she said. “You know what happens to attractive, it becomes wrinkled and fat.”

    In December 2001, she joined him in his cottage beside the sea in Galway.”

    “Sunny teaches yoga, I live on a pension,” Mr. Pringle told the Times . “We have two hens, two ducks and eight goats. We both milk the goats and Sunny makes cheese. It’s really a nice, simple life.”

    The Jacobs story became a hit Broadway play and three of the actresses who played her Brooke Shields, Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving turned up for the wedding.

    “Playing Sunny was so claustrophobic for me,” Shields said the Times , “You felt her powerlessness, this was a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same for Peter.

    “But despite everything they have been through, they are not bitter or jaded, they never closed their hearts. They are two people who are at peace with themselves and with the world. They could not have been more fated and meant to be with one another.”

    Jacobs and Mr. Pringle exchanged wedding vows and Irish Claddagh rings before a Hindu priest, and one of the most extraordinary marriages on record went into the books.

    http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Mar...#ixzz1eLFXym31

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Amblin to Produce STOLEN TIME Based on Real-Life Wrongful Conviction of Death Row Inmate Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs

    Amblin has hired Michelle Dean, writer and creator of the Hulu limited series The Act, to write another true story titled Stolen Time, based on the true story of wrongfully convicted death row inmate Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs.

    Deadline reports the biopic will tell “the riveting and timely story of Jacobs, who was in her 20’s when she and her husband, Jesse Tafero, were convicted of the fatal shooting of two law enforcement officers based on the false testimony of the man who actually committed the murders. Sources tell Deadline that as part of the development process, Dean and Blake are reviewing over 2,500 personal letters sent between Jacobs and Tafero, during their 15 year incarceration.”

    This is a wild story, and after the acclaimed series The Act, is seems like Dean is the right person to take it on. Are you interested in the true story that will be told in Stolen Time?

    https://geektyrant.com/news/the-act-...a-sunny-jacobs
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