Sunny Jacobs: Stolen Time — The Inspiring Story of an Innocent Woman Condemned to Death

Rachel Walsh

 
In June this year I had the honour of speaking at the NSW Amnesty International launch of Sunny Jacobs’ biography, Stolen Time.  I shared the stage with Amnesty, the NSW Council of Civil Liberties and Sunny herself who read extracts from the book and spoke generally about her experiences on death row and subsequently.  Sunny is also featured in the play The Exonerated.  In the film of the play, she is played by Susan Sarandon.  Much of the question and answer session at the launch of her book turned on the issue of compassion and forgiveness, and Sunny spoke at length about being inspired by an Edinburgh Festival production of Loreli — A Meditation on Loss (co-written by Nick Harrington).

On reading her book and again on hearing her speak, I was struck that Sunny’s story is not just ‘a’ story of Death Row, but ‘the’ story of Death Row.  She and her partner Jesse Tafero, were convicted in Florida of killing a state highway patrol officer and a visiting Canadian police officer and were sentenced to death in 1976.  They were both present with their two children in the car at the time of the shooting with Walter Rhodes, who was the only one to test positive to gun shot residue.  Rhodes turned state’s witness, testified that both Sunny and Jesse shot the officers, received a life sentence and was ultimately paroled.  He subsequently retracted his statement but it was not until 1992 that Sunny was exonerated, after 16 years of struggle to clear her and Jesse’s names.  From the outset, the scales were tipped against Sunny and Jesse; they were poor, unemployed, poorly educated, and from out of town — as is so commonly the case for those sentenced to death.  Their trial was beset by false testimony, including a false confession, a biased judge (who had only recently been elected to the bench after a career as a highway patrol officer) and a media screaming for their blood.  The exoneration came too late for Jesse who was killed in one of the more notorious ‘botched executions’ for which three jolts of electricity were required and during which six-inch flames were reported to have shot from his head.  To this day, Sunny has refrained from reading the official report into his death.

Sunny spent her first year on death row in solitary confinement, with a (contraband) piece of newspaper, woven intricately into a an eating mat, and some ants as her only contact with sanity.  She was the only woman on Death Row in Florida at the time.  It was not until she brought and won a civil rights suit (opposed vigorously by the state) that she was eventually accorded the basic rights that male death row prisoners enjoyed at the time and removed from solitary confinement.  She credits her survival to her knowledge and practice of yoga, turning her cell into a form of sanctuary.  Sunny’s strength of mind is a striking part of her story as is her single-minded determination to win back her family, her children, her partner, her freedom and her right to be respected as a human.  In a life beset by hardship and tragedy, her compassion and humanity are remarkable.