The Sunday Telegraph

'Maybe they were going to take my life on Death Row but until then it belonged to me' By Elizabeth Day (Filed: 12/02/2006)

Sunny Jacobs always thought that if you told the truth, people would believe you. So when, in 1976, she found herself on trial for a double murder she did not commit, she was absolutely certain that her innocence would set her free.

"I thought, if the jurors only knew me for five minutes, they would know I wouldn't kill anybody," she says. "I mean, I was a vegetarian hippy. I used to nurse wounded insects in little boxes. I was telling myself: soon they'll realise they've made a mistake. But it ended up taking them a really long time."

Jacobs was sentenced to death by electric chair and spent almost two decades on death row before her conviction was overturned. It took the American justice system 16 years and 233 days to acknowledge its mistake.

In 1976, Jacobs was 28 years old with long, centre-parted hair and large, round glasses. She was a mother of two, a daughter and a wife. When she was released from her prison in 1992, her hair was cropped and greying; her pale flesh wrinkled with middle- age. She was 45, an orphan, a widow and a grandmother.

Her crime? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1976 she and her common-law husband, , 29, had accepted a lift to Palm Beach, Florida, with an acquaintance, Walter Rhodes. Jacobs, travelling with her two young children - Eric, nine, and Christina, 10 months - did not know that Rhodes, 25, had a criminal past.

When two passing police officers searched the car, they discovered Rhodes had a gun, violating his parole conditions. Rhodes panicked, shot the policemen dead and made his getaway in their car.

After he was arrested at a roadblock further down the freeway, Rhodes struck a bargain. In exchange for three life sentences, he testified that Jacobs and Tafero were solely responsible for the fatal shootings. Rhodes got life imprisonment and was released in 1994. Jacobs and Tafero, the innocent parties, ended up on death row.

"For a while, it was an almost impossible reality to deal with," Jacobs, 58, says now, sipping on a cup of milky tea in a hotel bar in Galway, near her new home in the west of Ireland. "When you're arrested, your growth is arrested, too. The only thing you learn how to do is to be institutionalised.

"When I was released, choosing what to have for breakfast on my first day out almost had me in tears. I had to get my friend to help me order an omelette or it would have taken me days just to read the menu. "When I came to a closed door, I would just stand there because you weren't supposed to open doors - you had to wait for the guards to do it for you."

Now, 14 years after Jacobs's conviction was quashed, a play based on her life and the experiences of five other innocents on death row is opening in London later this month.

The Exonerated, written by and Eric Jensen, weaves together the stories of former prisoners in their own words and played off-Broadway to sell-out houses for two years. It reaped further acclaim at last year's Edinburgh Festival, with critics calling it "a masterpiece", and was made into a television film starring Susan Sarandon.

On stage, the cast changes regularly and so far, the actresses playing Jacobs have included Mia Farrow, Kathleen Turner and Brooke Shields. Kristin Davis, of Sex and the City fame, is due to play her in the forthcoming London production and Jacobs herself will be appearing on three nights.

What does she make of the play's success? "I'm thankful for it, for giving us a voice. I've seen a few actresses play me and the interesting thing is that they all start off a lot more angry than I am. Then, gradually as the play goes on, they get softer and more accepting. That was exactly my journey."

Indeed, for all the drama in her own life story, by far the most remarkable thing about Jacobs is her spirit of acceptance and forgiveness. Even the most devastating details of her imprisonment: the five years in solitary confinement, the anguished separation from her children and the death of her parents while in captivity, are recounted in quiet, even tones with the occasional disarming whoop of girlish laughter.

"At first, it was just devastating, totally overwhelming," she says, her bespectacled hazel eyes looking clearly ahead. "They take away your name and give you a number. By the time you end up in the cell, you are completely anonymous, stripped of your identity.

"Those first days were just agony. The cell was 9ft by 6ft, it was six steps from the door to the toilet bowl and all I could do was pace back and forth. I went between anger, fear and hopelessness. There was a tiny window and I would look out of it into the corridor and expect to see someone coming down the hallway to tell me they'd made a mistake." But no one came. For the first three months, Jacobs was not allowed to receive any letters or provided with any reading material. The guards did not talk to her.

She was the only woman in Florida on death row at that time and was only allowed out of her cell for twice-weekly showers.

"The first challenge is to hold on to your own humanity and not feel like an animal," she says. "You start losing your identity. There was no mirror in the cell, so I used to try and look into the little metal button you pressed to get water to check that I still existed. I felt I was fading away. "Eventually, I just refused to let it crush me. I wanted to have something left inside me to give to my children."

Her children had a traumatic time nonetheless. Eric, her son from a short-lived first marriage, was held in detention for two months after her arrest. At school, he was bullied by other children and developed a stutter. "He lost any faith in anything he had been taught to believe in," says Jacobs, quietly.

Christina, her daughter with Tafero was still breast-feeding when Jacobs went to jail. Both of them were looked after by Jacobs's parents until they were killed in a plane crash in 1982. Then Christina was taken into foster care and Eric began supporting himself as a pizza delivery boy. Both Eric and Christina have since married and have children of their own.

"The day my parents died was the worst day of my life. I reached the depths of despair. And then I refused that. I realised that maybe they [the state] would kill me, but until such time as they did, my life belonged to me. So I started exercising, I did yoga and meditation and I made a decision never to be bored, never to count the bricks in the wall. I began to see myself not as a prisoner, but as a monk in a cave."

After five years on death row, an appeal found that the trial judge had acted improperly and her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Throughout it all, Jacobs and Tafero exchanged daily letters, using words from a prison-issue Japanese dictionary as code for their endearments to escape the censors. "Never be lonesome," wrote Tafero in September 1976, "we're only separated by miles. This won't last either, believe that."

But it did last. It lasted in spite of Rhodes making several confessions during his imprisonment that he had falsely accused Jacobs and Tafero. It lasted through several Supreme Court appeal attempts. It lasted until 1990, when Tafero was strapped into the electric chair. The chair malfunctioned and the executioners had to pull the switch three times. It took over 13 minutes for Tafero to die, by which time flames were shooting out of his scalp.

Is Jacobs angry? "I was angry about Jesse's death. But I had to deal with that and move on. I miss Jesse and I think it's sad that he's not here to come up on stage with me. But I had to come to a decision over how I was going to deal with it. I made the same decision with Walter Rhodes. I could understand he wanted to save his own life, so I could forgive him."

And in a way, Jacobs has found the strength to save her own life too. Five years ago, she moved to Ireland and married Peter Pringle, a 67-year-old Irishman who was also wrongly sentenced to death for killing a policeman in Ireland before being exonerated in 1995.

The couple met at an Amnesty International conference and were struck by the similarities in their stories. "It was meant to be," says Jacobs, smiling. "I'm happy now. We have the nicest life out of anyone we know. We grow vegetables, I teach yoga, we have our cats and dogs. If I had been angry and resentful, I wouldn't have this happy life. That's the basis on which I forgive. That's my monument."

• will be performed at The Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, previewing from February 21. Inquiries: 0208 237 1111

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