#003 Jason Flom with Sunny Jacobs

In 1976, Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs was sentenced to death for the murders of Florida Highway Patrol officer Phillip Black and Donald Irwin, a visiting Canadian constable. The officers were killed during a traffic stop where Sunny was traveling with her boyfriend, Jesse Tafero, and her two children, Eric, nine, and Christina, 10 months, in a car driven by Walter Rhodes. After officers approached the vehicle, Rhodes fired shots at them, a gun battle ensued, and chaos erupted. Sunny and Jesse were arrested, and both of their children were taken away by the state. Rhodes negotiated a plea bargain with the state, claiming Jesse and Sunny had pulled the triggers, in exchange for a life sentence. In 1990, Jesse was executed by the state of Florida in horrific circumstances. Sunny spent five years in isolation on Florida’s death row and a total of 17 years in a maximum-security prison before her conviction was overturned. Sunny was freed in 1992 when she was 45 years old. In this episode, Jason talks with Sunny, her current husband, exoneree Peter Pringle, and her daughter Christina, who as a child was also a victim of this tragic injustice.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life.
I went to sleep because September seven was the first
day of my high school year. I was gonna be
a senior at twenty two, I was set to start college.
I woke up and my life was never the same again.
Cops came out with guns drone, and I never saw

(00:22):
freedom ever ever since after that. It's like roach Motown.
Once you get in and I getting out. This is
wrongful conviction with Jason Flower. Today we have a very

(00:50):
special guest, Sunny Jacobs, one of my favorite people in
the world. Sunny Jacob's story is as crazy as it
can get. Is that fair today? Sunny? It's pretty crazy.
So Sonny was wrongfully convicted in n I'm particularly thrilled
today because joining Sonny in the studio with me is her. Uh. Well,

(01:13):
I could call you a new husband, Peter Frenkle. It's
a few years now, but he's still a new husband.
And Sonny's daughter, Christina to Pharaoh, is going to speak
today publicly for the first time ever. So Sonny, Peter, Christina,
welcome to ronval conviction very much. So, Sonny, let's go
back to the beginning. Um, you were living where at

(01:35):
the time that this all went down. At the time
that this happened, Uh, we had been living in North Carolina,
but Jesse had gone down to Florida with the promise
of some work, and um we ended up joining him
down there. So he went down there originally to do

(01:56):
some work in Florida. But you went down with the
two kids afterwards to meet him. Yes, right, and then
when you went down there, your car broke down. Is
that what happens? How this all started? Pretty much that's
how it all started, right, So your car broke down.
Now your stranded in Florida. You've gotta get back home,
right right, So take us through it. What happens next?
You were you were offered a ride, which was turned

(02:17):
out to be a you know, the beginning the beginning
of the terrible Sava of Sonny Jacobs, which uh so
so phill us in filling the audience. Well, Um, the
car broken down, and Jesse asked a friend of his
to give us a lift, and uh, we were going
to go to someplace where he knew someone where we

(02:40):
could stay and wait for my parents to send some
money so we could get back home to North Carolina. Right,
but then you end up you end up at actually
taking a rest in the car when this happened, right, Yeah,
we pulled into a rest area off the highway in Florida. Yep,
in Florida. This was and Um was in the back

(03:00):
with the two children. Now, my son at the time
was nine years old. My daughter was only ten months old.
She was still nursing, right, yes, she was a and
um So um Jesse was in the passenger seat and
his friend who was driving, and then um So we
were sleeping in the car in the rest area. Nothing

(03:20):
was going on, There was no crime being committed. There
was no reason for anybody too. It seems like an
unlikely place for everything to go wrong completely, I mean
in your sleep now. Just to give you a visual.
By the way, if you would meet Sonny, you would
see that she looks like the least likely person who
have ever served time in anything other than uh, you know,
it looks like some of you would meet in a

(03:41):
coffee shop or in a in a theater or something.
I mean, she's uh, she's the least likely person who
have ever served time on death. At the time, I
was besides being a young wife and mother. I was
also a hippie, you know, like hippy Yeah cool. I
was a hippie and vegetarian. So I mean I was

(04:03):
totally the least likely person to be in any way
involved in in a scene where somebody would get killed.
So you're in the car, you're sleeping, and there's a
knock knock on the window, right, Well, yeah, we were
sleeping in the car. And then the police apparently came
to do a routine check of the rest area. And

(04:26):
it was in the police notes that they said that
when they looked in the driver's window, they saw a
handgun between the driver's feet, and that's what started the
whole thing. Um, the they pulled open the door, they
took the gun, they or pulled him out of the car.

(04:46):
Then they ordered Jesse out of the car. They took
everyone's I D. You're still in the back seat with
the kids. I was still in the back seat with
the kids. I never left the back seat. And they
called in the driver's identification. And then they wanted Jesse's idea,
and he was reluctant to give it. Uh, and then

(05:07):
they asked me my from my I D and um.
Then the word came back on the police radio that
the driver from whom they had taken the handgun was
on parole and as I say, so he was subject
to arrest. Well, as I say, often a gun and
being on parole, right, yeah, even in America, you're not

(05:28):
allowed to have a gun if you're on parole. So
that changed everything. The policeman then drew his gun and
he said something like if nobody moved, the next one
to move is dead. And then there's a gunfire, and
so I just covered the children. So you're like literally
laying on top of the children as a mother would, Yes,

(05:50):
I mean to protect them, and then there's guns and
you don't know what's going on. At this point seven
thirty in the morning, it was foggy, it was a
bit cool still in the morning, and all of a sudden,
this insane thing is going on. I mean, they were

(06:12):
I don't know how any bullets were fired, but it
was like, all of a sudden, we were in a war.
And I was over the children until it got quiet,
and I actually wasn't sure if we were still alive
because it was so quiet, and then I determined that

(06:32):
I was breathing. We were all I guess shocked by
what was happening. And then I looked up to see
if Jesse was okay, and I saw him just standing there,
frozen in between the two cars, looking as shocked basically
as I felt. And the other guy was running around

(06:55):
the car with a gun in his hand, ordering Jesse
to put us into the police car. And that point
we became hostages of the man who had just shot
the two policemen. Right now, jets more surreal. Right now,
you're being ordered to get into a police car by
a guy who just killed two policemen who you thought
was your friend, who was doing your favorite giving you
a ride. So it doesn't get much weirder than that.

(07:16):
And now you've got to take the kids at gunpoint
and put him in a police car. That's right. And
as we he helped me out of the car with
the baby and with my son Eric, Eric slipped and
fell into a pool of blood, and that's when I
saw the two policemen on the ground helped Eric up

(07:38):
and we got We were put into the back of
the police car Jesse and again in the passenger side,
and the guy drove us away. You know, if this
was in a movie, nobody would believe it right. So
now you're in the police car. What happens next? I
was thinking in my mind, okay, like, how do we
get away from this guy? He was racing down the

(07:59):
highway and because it was on the interstate, then he
pulls off. He was looking for to change cars. I
guess he realized that the police car was a little
too conspicuous. So there was a man, uh an old
fellow going out to get his his mail, and the

(08:23):
driver walked up to him, and Jesse followed him. And
I was still in the back of the car with
the kids, and I thought, ah, now now I can
get get get away from here, you know. So I
tried to open the doors, but you can't open the
back of a police car. Yeah, so we're stuck. Anyway,

(08:48):
Jesse came back and said, listen, he says, we have
to go with him in this man's car. So it
takes us and they transfer us into what is now
slightly less conspicuous in a police car and orange Cadillac.
That's great, this guy's this guy's got a flair for
the dramatic. So now this other poor man is also hostage.

(09:13):
They put me and the children in the front seat.
Jesse and the older man are in the back seat.
He's driving along and there's very heavy traffic by now,
right was it's rush hour. It's rush hour, and I
could hear helicopters above, and I thought, oh my god,

(09:33):
maybe the traffic is so bad because maybe there's a
roadblock or something, and maybe that's a helicopter. And we're
going to be saved. You're gonna be saved, right, the
cops are going to come get you this nightmare. And
what we didn't know at the time was that when
the man went out to get his mail, his wife
was watching out the window. Something shouldn't happen to him

(09:54):
from the building to the post box and back now,
and she saw the whole thing and she called the police.
So the police. So this means two things. One, the
police knew that this man had been kidnapped by this
other guy who had with the police car and US number. Two,

(10:15):
they knew that there was a woman, two children, and
a man hostage in that car in the orange Cadillac
driving along in the orange cadillock. Now in the front
with the two children, Jesse's in the back with the
old man, and we come upon the roadblock. You can
see it. There's a roadblock. Thank god, I'm thinking he

(10:39):
makes this insane decision to try to avoid the roadblock,
at which point he makes a sharp left and all
the police lined up at the roadblock with their rifles
open fire on the gun car. Holy ship, again, we
are being bomb arted by bullets. I covered the children again,

(11:06):
and the car was bouncing with the bullets, just like
you know in the movie about Bunny and Clyde, where
the car is actually bouncing with bullets. That's how it was.
And then we crashed. We crashed into a semi that
was parked as part of the roadblock. The police surround
the car. Um The only one who's actually injured was

(11:30):
the driver. He was shot in the leg. That's a miracle, yes, yes,
it's a miracle that we were all alive. So they
took him and put him in an ambulance. They took
Jesse out of the car. They handcuffed him. They took
the man out of the car. They took him away somewhere,
and Jesse standing there, handcuffed, and a cop comes from

(11:51):
the crowd with his gun turned around with the button
and forward and ran over and smashed Jesse in the
head and knocked them to the ground, and he said,
you better get away from me because they're going to
kill me. Okay, so you're holding his hand, you're holding
the baby Christina, who's here. Now we can call you
a miracle baby. Now since you survived before you were
a year old. You survived two gunfights. It's quite extraordinary,

(12:17):
very lucky. And she's a lovely, lovely young woman. If
you'd meet her now, I'm so go ahead. So now
what I mean even still, what are you thinking? Now?
Are you thinking because you your saviors are here the cops. No,
they're not our saviors anymore. But they're pointing guns at me.
A minute ago they were yeah, and then all of
a sudden, the whole thing turned, and now they're pointing
guns at me and I I tried to explain that

(12:42):
we didn't know. I didn't know really what was going on,
but they didn't. They weren't listening because they were there.
They had just had two of their comrades at the time.
I didn't know, but they were killed. They were dead.
We or one of us are all of us with
response bowl and it wasn't up to them to figure
it out. It was up to them to apprehend us.

(13:04):
And so they take us to an unused portion of
the railroad track where the police get out of their
cars and start arguing among themselves whether or not to
take us in or to simply kill us right there
and say we tried to escape. Wow, I couldn't tell

(13:24):
you how many there were, but there was a group
of them, and I remember there were three of them
standing right by the car where I was, and they
were they were so vehement about they were like, you know,
like when your people are so angry, they start spitting,
you know, Like I could see the spit coming out
of the when they were talking, you know, and it
was it was one of the most frightening moments. And

(13:47):
like I'm sitting there praying, like I hope that would
the one I call in my head the voice of
reason should prevail, which think God. Eventually he did because
otherwise they were nobody would have known. So um, he
did prevail. They decided they would take us in. Two
detectives came in and they started trying to question me,

(14:09):
and they record. In those days, they had the you know,
the tape recorders with real tape, you know, and uh
so they kept trying to ask me what, what what happened,
and and I kept telling them, I'm really I really
don't know. I really don't know exactly what happened, because
just like I told you, they were taking our idea

(14:30):
and asking us questions, and then they were shooting, and
I honestly didn't see who were shooting. So they didn't
believe me because they figure, if you're there, you know
what happened. So they every time I'd say, you know,
you're trying to get me to say something that's not true,

(14:51):
they stopped the recording and start a new recording. While
we were being um interrogated, the guy, the driver of
the guy who actually did the killing, from his hospital bed,
asked to speak to the prosecutor. Now I was this
is this is how later I found this out. I

(15:12):
didn't know. We didn't know at the time. But you see,
he knew he was facing the electric chair, so he
wanted to make a deal, so he requested to speak
to the prosecutor. And the prosecutor UH at the time

(15:34):
was apparently had ambitions to run for district district attorney,
so rather than get one conviction, he was going to
get three convictions, and after our trials, he did in
fact resign as prosecutor and run for attorney on the
basis of his strong stance against crime. So what happened
was that the the killer was offered a plea bargain

(15:59):
for three life sentences in exchange for his testimony against
Jesse and me. These plea bargains should not be allowed
in capital cases because it's always going to be the
most guilty party that takes the plea bargain because they're
the one who has the most to lose. Well, they
have everything to lose their life. Well, I thought, yes, exactly,
So I thought, well, when I found out about it,

(16:19):
I thought, well, this is a no brainer. No innocent
person would accept three life sentences. I mean, that's not
a bargain, you know, not to an innocent person. So
I figured the jury will do this, they'll know, and
we'll go home. I never stood the concept of three
life senses. Does anyone have three lives? I don't know why.
In this country. Is very odd. I'm never like, I mean, anyway,

(16:42):
it's very very odd. And he eventually got out. But
that's another story, so it's even weird. It's another story.
But but he's also back in. So it just so
people shouldn't how do you have three life why don't
you give the guy one life sense and keep him
in instead of three life senses? I don't know whatever.
That's just another aspect of the case that's that's very strange,
and the system that's very strange. But anyway, so go ahead.
So um, so this plea plea arrangement was made unbeknownst

(17:05):
to us. And also in order to to justify giving
the plea bargain, they have to give the person a
polygraph test to prove that they're not making the deal
with the real killer. Okay, so apparently he was given
a polygraph test and they submitted a report that he
passed a polygraph test. Therefore they were justified in making

(17:27):
the plea bargain. Jesse's trial went first. He was tried, convicted,
and sentenced to death in four days. My trial last
two weeks. Um. We all were appointed the public defender.
But because now one was going to testify against the others,
they had to give us special public defenders, which is

(17:47):
regular lawyers who act as who represent you as if
they were the public defender. Um, And they don't get
paid a lot, so they don't always do luck because
they have other clients. They have to make a living.
So Um and my parents were asked, actually, do you
want to maybe get a higher a lawyer. But we thought,

(18:08):
why should they have to mortgage their home to try
to get me a lawyer, because we were told even
in those days to be a hundred thousand dollars or more.
In those days, that was a total fortune. So I said,
I said, there's no need to do that. I'm completely innocent.
I mean, it's it's not like there was even a fingerprint.
There's nothing. I was absolutely nothing against me. So we

(18:29):
didn't have the dream team and we didn't have the
expert witnesses or whatever. And my lawyer at the time,
the appointed lawyer, said, we're not going to put up
a defense because there's absolutely no nothing against you. There's
no evidence against you, and it gives me a better

(18:50):
position in the closing arguments. You know, whatever, you say,
you're my lawyer. I'm not scared. I didn't do anything.
I still believed in truth, justice, in the American way,
in Superman and all those things. So Um. In the
second week of the trial, the jury started asking questions,

(19:12):
they weren't convinced by the killer. So it turns out
that the prosecutor or his team, whoever it was, went
and located a girl in the jail who had been
arrested for a minor drugs charge and UM, she and
her boyfriend were arrested, and they told her that if
she could help them to convict me, she and her

(19:35):
boyfriend would release released the next day. If they couldn't,
then she would go to prison for a long time
in her life would be ruined, and she'd never get
back to university. Jail House snitches are actually, uh, you know.
In the most recent report from the Center for Wrongful
Convictions UM, it was shown that in almost forty six
percent of the capital cases that have been overturned, a

(19:58):
jail house snitch was the sort of deciding factor. Right, so, well,
she said that I spoke to her in the one
night that they put her in the cell block where
I was, and I never spoke to her that. She
said that I told her that I did it, I
enjoyed it, and I'd do it again, Like all right,
somebody would really say that to a strange parerson, you know,

(20:21):
it's your I thought now they're really going to know
that this is ridiculous. And the jury wasn't convinced, and
in fact, they asked more questions, and they were starting
to ask questions about like maybe could they at least
consider accomplice or something like that. And it was as
a result of the judge's instructions to the jury at
that point that they felt that they had no choice

(20:43):
to convict, but to convict because we didn't put up
a defense. And I should say that the judge had
been a former highway patrolman and we had asked him
to recuse himself from the cases because you couldn't possibly
be um non biased in the case that involved the

(21:04):
killing a policeman if you had been part of that
brotherhood yourself. But he refused to step down from the cases.
So right was worth noting that the judge judge had
a nickname which was Maximum Dan. Yes, and he kept
a little miniature electric chair on his desk that he
used to do zibibi. You know, let's just reflect on
that for a moment. So you have a judge, this

(21:27):
is America. You have a judge who's a former state
trooper presiding over a trial in which a state trooper.
Was he a state trooper was killed? There's no reason
to think that he wouldn't be totally objective under those circumstances.
And he's got an electric chair on his desk going
zoo right, touching it and like almost like taunting you, right,

(21:47):
And he and his name was Maximum Dan so um.
It was as a result though, of his explanation of
the law to the jurors that they felt they had
no choice but to convict. Then comes the sentencing phase.
And in the sentencing phase, they have to be unanimous
in order to give a death sentence. Okay, And there

(22:07):
was one juror, And this is really important for people
to know because people think, you know, one person doesn't
make a difference. One person does make a difference. Because
this juror wasn't convinced. He wasn't really convinced that they
should have convicted me, but he surely wasn't going to
sentence me to death. And so he stood up for
what he believed in the face of all the pressure

(22:29):
from the other jurors to agree with them. And as
it's as a result of his integrity that my jury
wasn't able to be unanimous and I was sentenced to life.
That's where the judge gets involved, right, And this principle
of judicial override is something I want to talk about

(22:50):
because this judge then overrode the jury, right, and he
decided that you should be sentenced to death. Right. And
that's an interesting thing to talk about because there were
only three states in which this principle of judicial override
was constitution was it was was considered constitutional. Now there's
only one, and it won't shock you to know that

(23:11):
it's Alabama. Even Florida has had it overturned, as has Delaware,
which was the other holdout. So not now only an
Alabama can it happened, And judicial override has uh. It's
been an issue in about a quarter of the death
penalty cases since the death penalty was re enacted in
the seventies, and yet it's been a factor in fifty

(23:34):
of the death sentences that have been overturned. So what
that tells you is that the jury is very focused on,
or or at least interested in the idea that they
they may be convicting, but they may have enough of
a shred of a doubt that they don't want to
sentence you to death. And that finality, but the judge,
for whatever reason, doesn't feel the same compunction. And in

(23:56):
your case, it's obvious why he was a former state
trooper and he was a I who was a you know,
a very Uh he was maximum dan right he was
going to throw the death penalty if he was going
to throw it out a vegetarian hippie, uh like you.
So anyway, Um, so you're sentenced to death. Um, you
end up on there is at this point, there is
no death row for women in Florida. Right. Oh no,

(24:18):
because in n there had been a three year moratorium
just prior to to our cases and they had um
changed all the death sentences to life, so there wasn't
there were very few men on death row and there
were no women. So I became the only woman in
the United States with a sentence of death at that time. Wow. Yeah,

(24:39):
there's a sort of a distinction, I suppose. And Um,
so they didn't actually know what they were going to
do with me, so everybody was kind of speculating in
the jail what they would do with me, and um,
what they did is they cleared out a building that
had been used for disciplinary purposes, like if there had
been a riot in the prisoner or whatever, and they
had to lock up a lot of peak booll That

(25:01):
was what that building had been used for. So there
were a number of cells on each side. It was
like a dungeon. Like I'll just say six, I'm not
really sure anymore. How there were six cells on each
side and in the in the front there was an
office where the guard would stay, and the whole building
was surrounded by its own barbed wire fence within the

(25:22):
barbed wire of the prison itself. No other prisoners were
allowed in proximity of that building. So there you are
all alone, right, There's nobody else in there. I was
the only person in that building. How insane is that?
When I was there, I was locked up twenty four
hours twenty four hours a day in a tiny cell.

(25:42):
That's right. It was six steps from the door to
the toilet, and I could reach out both my arms
and touch the side walls. There was a metal shelf
with a thin mattress that was my bed, and then
there was a toilet and sync combination. That was all
that was in the cell. I spent the first five
years of the seventeen year is that it took to
resolve this in solitary confinement sense to death. After five

(26:16):
years in solitary confinement, finally my first appeal came up.
It took that long in in those days, and as
a result of the judge overruling the jury without giving
a proper written reason for having done so, they had
to change my sentence from death to life. So then

(26:37):
they put me in the prison population, and which was
another strange circumstance to try to deal with after having
been first a free person and then isolated for five
years and then be put into the prison population. So
that was another thing. But then after year, after my

(26:59):
sentence was changed from death to life, that's when my
parents um were killed in a plane crash. The worst
part was that my children then became orphans again. And
by then my daughter was about seven six years old.
And you remember it, I do remember it very clearly.
Ask you, I'm in awe of your mother. Do you

(27:20):
watch that? You do you listen to her and just say,
I mean, who is she's like? Does she have a
cake that she wears around at night? Like that? You
have to tell everyone, my mom is the most amazing
person you'll ever meet. She's my favorite. I mean and
and then uh, and Peter, we haven't even gotten to
you yet. Was also the funniest woman in the world

(27:42):
and so sunny. So then, yes, a number of things
happened in the interim um. At one point, the guy
who actually did the killing was bragging in prison about
how he had killed the two officers, and you know,
he had these other two people on death row for
what he'd done. He confessed a number of times, and

(28:06):
on one occasion some other prisoners came forward and actually,
we're willing to go to court and testify, but the
judge ruled that it was prisoner's word wasn't believable. So
how come it's believable if they testify against you, but
it's not believable if they testify for you, because it's

(28:27):
any convenient for them. That's why, you know. So we
didn't prevail. And when that happened, Jesse was like, this
is it. They were going home. You know, I told
you keep your spirits up. He was always trying to
keep my spirits up. He told you this by letters. Yeah,
so you knew that the real killer had been bragging
and had essentially confessed. So you're like, now we're going home.

(28:50):
I mean obviously right. But we didn't go home. They
didn't go home, In fact, quite the opposite. And it
was that at that hearing that they bought brought us
both to court. That's the last time I ever saw
Jesse actually in person. I always advise people, if you're
going to have to go into the appeals process, to
get very young lawyer, because my original appeals lawyer died

(29:13):
of art attack before the appeals process could be completed,
because it takes so many years. As you know, people
spent twenty thirty years on death row before they're exonerated.
Lawyer who you anyway, So anyway, these were two young
lawyers who were mentoring under him, and they both decided

(29:36):
they would continue to fight for my case because they
believed in my innocence. Thank god, in the eleventh year,
these two young lawyers who paired up and then eventually married. Uh,
give me the use of a private investigator from some
other call into it. Paid for it for one day.
And I want to find the woman, the young woman

(29:58):
who testified against me in the trial, right, the one
that we called the jailhouse snitch. So they said, forget
about it. She's a drug addict, she's probably dead, but
she wasn't because after this happened, she cleaned up her
life and she never looked back. And she moved to
Wyoming somewhere, and she was taking care of her sick father,

(30:20):
and she had a little family of her own, and
she had no idea what happened to me. She didn't
even know. So the lawyer, the investigative founder, the lawyer's
going they see her, and she cried and she apologized.
She was devastated to find out that what at least
partly as a result of what she had done, had
happened to me. But they she was she would do

(30:46):
anything except come back to Florida. And there's a reason
why she want to come back to her Yeah, because
she was scared to death because the prosecutor was now
a district attorney, even more powerful, and she was afraid
that he would find a way to put her in
prison too, maybe for perjury that he helped her do.
So she was terrified. And unless she was willing to
come back to testify and be cross examined, we couldn't

(31:07):
use her testimony. The prosecutor sent a couple of his
guys out to Wyoming to talk to her. Father to
have him convince his daughter that she shouldn't come back
and get involved her. Yes, and that's what made her
come back. She got so mad that they would dare
to disturb her sick father, that she came back. And

(31:31):
she is a hero. She's heroic. We had a federal hearing.
She testified, She took the stand, She told everything that happened.
She sat there and apologized to me. She cried. Then
it was the prosecutors turned to cross examined. As he

(31:52):
approached the bench where she said, she grabbed her chest.
She started a hyper mentally and she had a heart attack.
And honestly, all I could think of at that moment
was please God, don't let her die before a cross examination. Please,
because unless we could cross examined, you can't use your testimony.

(32:13):
Everything she said would have been for nothing. Oh my god.
So anyway, the medical person came in. Uh, they brought
the paramedics. They took her away in an ambulance, and
we didn't know what was going to happen. Uh. Finally, um,
she recovered. She went back to Wyoming, and the judge

(32:34):
said that we could videotape her testimony from Wyoming, so
they all went out there and they did the cross
examination whatever, and in the end the judge ruled that
it was her word former drug addict, against the word
of the upstanding citizen, the prosecutor, and we didn't prevail again.

(32:56):
So meanwhile, was this before or after Jesse was executed?
That was in the eleventh year, right, so he was
still Yes, in the fifteenth year or incarceration, Jesse received
his third death warrant, which is normally fatal, and in
his case it was as well, and he was taken
to the electric chair, right. And then it gets worse

(33:17):
because in Jesse's case, and people may remember this because
it's a very well documented and famous, uh, tragedy, tragic situation. Um.
So in Jesse's case, uh, he went to the electric chair,
but the electric chair malfunctioned. It was known as old sparky, right,
so it wasn't exactly a modern piece of equipment by prisoners,

(33:40):
built by prisoners, And there's at least the theory going
around that they may have deliberately tampered with it in
order to make his execution more like a torture. Yes,
because he had of course been convicted of killing two
police officers. So um So, in his case, the electric
air amount functioned. It took over ten minutes for him

(34:03):
to die. Took thirteen and a half minutes for Jesse
to Pharaoh to die. And the word was in the
prison that they had substituted the natural sea sponge in
the helmet for with an artificial one, so that when
they pulled the switch instead of dying, instead of conducting
the current properly. Witnesses on behalf of the media said

(34:27):
that the flame shot two ft in the air out
of his head, and that smoke came out of his ears,
and then it took thirteen and a half minutes for
Jesse tafarair tone And um we shouldn't have a death
penalty in this country in my opinion at all. I
don't think the death penalty should exist in any country,

(34:49):
because if you believe in the death penalty, you have
to be willing to accept the idea that people like
Jesse ta Fair are going to be executed. There is
no perfect system, there is no way to make sure
you've got it right. There's always going to be human error.
You can't get that back, um so, so Jesse's actually
can't give him back to his children either. No, you

(35:11):
can't give him back to his children. UM. I mean
and and Christina, I mean, I can't even it's hard
for me to even bring myself to ask you, um,
what you experienced during this period of time. I mean,
were you aware that your parents were innocent? How No,
I wasn't aware they were innocent, but I mean I didn't.

(35:37):
I didn't believe it either. Now I've I've blacked out
a lot from it, just as a coping mechanism for myself.
Not blacked out. I remember a lot of things. Um,
I don't really honestly remember what I thought. I just
knew that they were gone. And you know, my mom
was always telling me, you know, I'm coming home home,

(36:00):
you know, coming home soon. You know, I just wanted
them back. I don't think I care. I don't think
I cared. I just wanted my parents back. Um. It's
funny because the day might they killed my father. UM.
I had two friends with me and I saw them
both yesterday after like twenty years, both of them that

(36:23):
the we were children. And I'll never forget that morning
because I wanted to go to school. I didn't want
to be home sinking in the news and my parents
are watching it. It's now and my two friends Sarah
and Marvin were on my bus with me. But I

(36:44):
was the first one on the bus. And when I
got on the bus, the bus driver was actually listening
to it on the radio and I could hear it,
and she didn't know. And the next up the bus
driver didn't know that my father right, So the next
stop was my friend Sarah, and I'm just sitting stoic

(37:06):
on the bus. I probably was crying. Sarah knew what
was happening, and um, she came and she just got
on the bus and sat on one side of me
and put her arm around me. We didn't say a word.
Then my friend Marvin, who's an NYPD officer here by

(37:28):
the way, Um, but he was now but we were kids,
then got on the bus and he sat on my
other side and just put his arm around me. And
they held me in love the entire way to school,
and they knew what was happening. And um, I didn't
end up staying in school because I had an issue
while I was at school and I got sent home,

(37:49):
which I should have been home anyway, But um, I
didn't know. I didn't know about the malfunction of the chair,
and I actually found out walking through the mall. I
think it was the next day through a friend of
mine who was like, you know, I'm really sorry about

(38:10):
your dad, and I'm like thanks, you know. He's like,
it's terrible what happened, and I'm like it is and
he goes, no, but how his head caught fire? And
I had I didn't know. Nobody told me and I
wasn't watching TV. I wasn't I was trying not to
pay attention to it, to tell you the truth, And

(38:31):
that's how I found out. And I was angry, to
say the least, that nobody told me. And I'm hearing
it from not a stranger, but not somebody I should
be hearing that from either. And it was really hard.
I had seen my dad, was it just a few
days before, right, And and it was a really hard visit,

(38:51):
knowing what was going to happen to him, really emotional
visiting my grandmother, my grandma Ky. His mother somehow finagled
me to get an actual contact visit because it was
my only visit with my father behind glass and it
was always contact visits, so knowing it's the last time

(39:12):
I'm going to see him. I really wanted to sit
on his lap. I wanted to give him a hug.
I wanted to kiss his face, you know. And somehow
Chief andagled it. But they did have to strip search me,
which was weird because I'm a kid, but I didn't care.
I just wanted to be with my dad. So but
I I'll never forget that day. Yeah, insane, and I

(39:37):
you know, I don't know what to say about it.
But it was very, very, very hard because I'm connected
with my father, I'm connected with my mother on a
different level. I can feel them, I can, you know.
So I knew he was gone is you know. And
then knowing what happened to him made it even harder.
And not being told immediately too, It's like wow. And

(40:02):
then you have everyone you know feeling sad for you
and makes it worse, you know. And then I got
sent away to school. I got sent away to boarding school,
like about six months later, eight months later. See, there's
no help for the families of people who are in

(40:22):
death row. There's no help at all. I can't even talk. Um, well,
I'll help you out here. Um, you know, it was
it's no one knows what to do there's there's actually
no help for the families. I mean, when when's ats

(40:45):
very least, when somebody's being executed, there should be somebody
for their family, and there isn't. So at first I
was very upset and angry at the foster parents who
are taking care of Tina, to to know that instead
of keeping her there and loving her and giving her
that family support and letting her be perhaps with me

(41:06):
and grand Mackay, you know, so we could grieve together,
they she was sent away. But to be fair, I
understand now they didn't know what the heck to do.
What do you do with this child? How do you
deal with this? And it's shame, the shame of it.
So they sent her away to a school for children

(41:28):
with emotional behavioral problems and she was locked up until
she was eighteen years old. So now she's locked up too.
And yeah, and in a strange way, it gave us
a commonality, you know, like, yeah, I understand what it's
like to be locked up, ma, because I was locked
up too. So the suffering of these wrongful convictions isn't

(41:51):
confined to the one person. It's their whole family that suffers.
And some of the people whose children have family to
go to that you know, they can stay with too,
much better than the people whose children don't have family
to stay with and end up in foster care because
they just they just don't have a chance. The stigma

(42:15):
um on top of everything else. Because for a little Christina,
you know, to be getting that sympathy is sort of nice.
But even that's got to be complicated because your friends
didn't know if your father was a cop killer or not, right,
you didn't even know. And I drew up in a
neighborhood like it was upper middle class neighborhoods, So there's

(42:37):
a lot of maybe keeping up with the Joneses, if
I can say that. And you know, the people I
was with, you know, they didn't want everybody to know
my story because again, you know, people are gonna judge.
You know, oh my gosh, you have this child in
your house, you know, so you know, and I just
showed up out of nowhere and all of a sudden,
you know, part of their family, and I have brother,

(42:59):
and so it's like it's complicated. It's really really complicated.
And yes, I would, I would go to visit my
parents and I would I would come back to school,
and obviously I would have not mental issues, but I
would have emotional issues going on. I'm just you know,
I go, I take you know, a week out of school,
and I'm going from prison to prison, and I'm getting sick.

(43:22):
I have double ear infections. You know, I'm a boss
to Dad's was what like seven hours up to Dad's prison.
You know, I would fly by myself. It was very
hard as a as a child. And again I don't
remember a lot of it, but I do remember having
a little trouble at school when I've come back and
there was an adjustment again. And you know, I just

(43:42):
visited both my parents in prison and from prison to
prison until like that to the point where, um, apparently
I felt it was just too disruptive to their lives
to keep bringing her, and they stopped. So then finally, uh,

(44:15):
just after Jesse's execution, Uh, a friend of mine, a
childhood friend, her name is Mickey Diakov. She came to
visit me because she wanted to console me over what
had happened. I mean, the whole country, the whole world,
who had heard what happened to Jesse. In fact, they
stopped using the electric chair in Florida as a result

(44:37):
of Jesse's execution fell. I was fifteen and living in
New York and I heard about it, so thousand miles away. Yeah, oh,
people over the world heard about it. And Jesse said,
they will remember my name. That was one of the
last things he said. We had a ten minute phone
call just before he was execution, just maybe a few
hours before. Chris, do you remember the last thing he

(44:58):
said to you? He said, to be brave? Yeah, and
you are and I am. I think if he could
see you now, he would be extremely proud. He can
see so um. Mickey came to visit me, and she said,

(45:22):
what can I do to help you? Because we were
kids growing up on Long Island together, and I was
like the most least likely person in the whole world
to ever be in any way involved in something like this,
and everybody that knew we knew that. So she said,
what can I do? Can I talk to a lawyer,

(45:43):
because she's a documentary filmmaker and she has research skills,
and her partner is a civil lawyer, but still a
lawyer that knows about how the law works, and they
wanted to help me, So I said, sure, go talk
to my lawyer, fine, you know, so they did. And

(46:07):
as a result of that, about two and a half
years after Jesse was executed, they were able to put
together my habeas corpus in a way with diagrams, which
they had to get special permissions, first time they ever
used diagrams and a habeas corpus, and they were able
to clearly show what we had been trying to show
for years is that I couldn't and Jesse couldn't possibly

(46:29):
have committed this crime, and my sentence and conviction were
overturned and I should have been free. But as you know,
they don't like to admit they're wrong exactly, so um
they threatened to take me to a new trial. And

(46:50):
in those days it was just just I think I
was the second person after Alfred that they did this.
The the Alfred lee is a thing where they say,
if you let us convict you of a lesser charge,
you don't have to plead guilty. You can maintain your

(47:12):
innocence and then you can leave. You can be free.
But if not, we're going to take you back to
a new trial. It could take years, we might sentence
you to death again. And now they're more desperate than before,
because now it's going to show all the illegal things
that they did, so they're really going to be desperate.
We already knew that they had another false witness already

(47:36):
lined up to come to the new trial. I even
heard that she was promised a white couch for her
living room in exchange for her testimony. White couch got
orange cadillacs and white couches. I mean, this story is
I mean, you know, Nikki and Christie that my friends

(47:59):
who are helping me at the time to help without
helping working with my lawyers, they were warned that it
was dangerous to even try to help, and that they
were being followed and that their phones were being tapped.
Everyone was so afraid because of the power. You know,

(48:20):
a person in that position has a lot of power,
and um, they almost all the power. Actually, yes, it's
you know, it's interesting how it works because when someone
is accused of crime, the police gathered through all the evidence,

(48:41):
they give it over to the prosecutor. The prosecutor then
decides which parts he is going to give to the
defense and which parts he doesn't have to buy law
gifted the offense to the defense, and then they have
the trial so it's like we have a deck of cards,
fifty two cards. I have all the cards. I'm gonna
look at them. I'm gonna decide which one is I'm

(49:02):
going to give you, and now we're gonna play. You're
gonna play with me, of course not because the deck
is totally stacked. I decide which cards you can have.
I'm not giving you all the aces I can tell you.
So that's how that's how it works. It's it's really
not fair to put another human being in that position,
because look, we're all subject to human nature. Okay, everybody

(49:27):
wants to win, everybody wants to be the best. And
if there's nobody ever going to know, come on, you know,
nobody's ever gonna know that you hid that one card.
We have a situation where there's these hearings going on.
I am now offered a deal. They offered to me.
This is before the offer plea thing comes up. They
offered to me. They say, Okay, we're having these hearings,

(49:51):
so exactly this is it's interesting what happened hearings. First
of all, in the hearings, we find out about the
fact that, uh, there was a polygraph test. Now Mickey says,
why should we believe them, they lied about so much.
We want to see this polygraph test, the actual graph
that came off the machine. Right, So they get ahold

(50:14):
of the polygraph tests and they hire a guy who
was a former policeman who is now a polygraph expert,
and he takes a look at it and he says,
he didn't pass the polygraph test. He failed the polygraph
test where it said he passed, he actually failed. So
the report that they entered saying he passed the polygraph

(50:34):
test was a lie. They entered a false report, and
that was the basis of their arrangement with him in
the first place. That day they come to me and
they say, okay, we're gonna offer you a deal. If
you'll say that the guy they made the deal with

(50:57):
didn't do it and I didn't do it, we'll let
you go free today. You can have a steak dinner today.
Excuse me, I'm a vegetarian. What were they trying to say?
If I didn't do it and the other guy didn't
do it, then who did it? The figure will blame Jesse.

(51:17):
He's dead anyway, right, And we all go out and
E's fine, but I'm not doing that. Okay. First of all,
he still has children and a mother. Second of all,
I they took everything from me. They took my whole
life from me. They took everything from but my integrity.

(51:38):
And it was like I felt like I was. It
was like dealing with the devil. Now. They wanted that
last thing. They wanted my very soul, and I wasn't
going to do it because I had made a life
for myself in prison. We started a little community group
to try to make life better for the life. First

(52:00):
we we um I was teaching math and and and
English in the school. I was teaching yoga because yoga
and meditation and prayer was what saved me while I
was on death row. There was not enough time to
tell everything, but it was my practice of yoga that
helped me with the physical effects of all the emotions,

(52:23):
and meditation that helped me to clear myself spiritually, and
prayer which gave me the hope that there was something
out there stronger than them that could see me through.
And so I had made a life for myself in there.
I could hold my head up and say, you know what,

(52:44):
at least I have integrity, whereas if I were to
do that. No matter where you are, you have to
live with yourself. So I said, I'm sorry, I don't
need steak, Thank you very much. Take me back to prison.
They didn't know they were dealing with so I said,
take me back, and they did. They took me back.

(53:04):
Things went on usually. I went back to my job
in the prison whatever, and and then ah, a week
or so later, I got called back on a Friday.
Now you get called back to the court on a Friday.
They know that. Everybody's sure you're going home because they

(53:25):
don't want to keep you in the county over the weekend.
So everybody lined, they lined the walkways. They were like,
you're going home. You're going home. Oh, They're all pat
me on the back, say a lot to your children.
You know you're going home. Um. They took me back
to court and I was like praying, and I was

(53:46):
like I could almost feel my parents and Jesse around me,
you know, in the van, because you're you know, you've
got your hands handcuffed with the box, you know, so
you can't and your feet handcuffed and everything feet coffed.
I guess you're going And they took me back to
court and my lawyers say to me, um, okay, they're

(54:08):
offering you this deal, another deal this time. They say
that if you'll just allow them to read into the record,
you know, a conviction of a listed degree, you don't
have to plead guilty, and you can go home. You
don't have to implicate, and you can go home, and

(54:32):
you have ten minutes. And I sat there and I thought, well,
you know, when I went into prison when this happened,
I was twenty seven years old. By the time I
was sitting there trying to make this decision, I was
forty five years old. When I went in. I was

(54:52):
a young mother and a wife and a daughter. And
at that point in my life when I had to
make this decision, I was a widow and an orphan
and a grandmother because my son Eric by then had
a three and a half year old daughter of his own.
And I thought, you know, you never know what will

(55:15):
happen in the next few years, if they're going to
take me to a trial again, and how long that's
going to take, and whatever will come with me. You
knew what they were capable of by this point, I mean,
you made the right decision. And so I told them
that I would accept on the condition that I was
not going to plead guilty to anything, that I would
maintain my innocence, And they said that was okay, but

(55:38):
that during the hearing I had to keep absolutely silent.
I was not allowed to say anything. That was the deal.
I was not allowed to say anything during this next hearing.
So okay, this hilarious, by the way, she knows. So
she left. Christina's laugh because I can't keep my mouth

(55:58):
if she can't. And the judges read. You see what
happens at one of these alphred hearing things is that
the prosecutor is allowed to read into the record everything
he would have said against you had there been a
new trial, and you're not allowed to say anything to
refute what he's saying, which is a bunch of crap.
So I say, I'm sitting there listening to this litany

(56:23):
just ridiculous stuff in my opinion, and I'm trying to think,
what can I say. There's got to be something I
can get away with saying here, So I go, your honor,
and my lawyer pinches me. She's chinching me, and he goes, yes,
I said I'd like a drink of water. I have
a bad taste in my mouth. Wow, And he goes

(56:49):
bailiff has a drink of water. I get my water
on holl he's dying. At least I said something, said
favor something something. I wasn't sure there was anything that
could make me love you more than I already do.
That's it. That's one of the that's one of the

(57:09):
best one liners in the history of the world. So
congratulations on that. You got the last word a court right,
so to speak, because you managed to give them a
very sunny ish sort of middle finger to the entire system.
And you were freed. And now I want to talk
about your life now because it's extraordinary. Um. Everything about

(57:30):
you is extraordinary. Um. But the crazy twist that life
took several years ago, it's really the subject that I
want to turn to now. It's my favorite part. So
it's one of my favorite parts too. So, so what
happened is I took time off to to get a

(57:53):
life for myself and to get a persona other than
the victim of injustice. And it became Sunny, the yoga teacher,
the happy pink dot floatinger. I used to wear pink
all the time because in prison, you couldn't wear nice colors,
so you had this pink sweatpants and pink sweatshirt and
used to run around being the yoga teacher all over
Los Angeles until um, finally um. I went back into

(58:16):
the death penalty movement again, and I met some representatives
of Emnesty International from Ireland and they heard me talk
and invited me to Ireland to speak. And this is
where the story gets good. Yeah ending, the happy ending, Yes,
the happy ending. She I got this phone call one
day and American woman who said her name was Sunny

(58:39):
Jacobs and whom I've never heard of, and says she
was going to be given a talk three days later
where I in the town I was in, inviting me
to come along. I said, what are you going to
talk about? She said that death penalty. I said, yes,
I'm interested in that. I'll come along, and I brought
two friends and so I went along and the door
opened across the room and this little lady walked in

(58:59):
and I walked over to her and I said, you
must be Sunny Jacobs and she said to me, you
must be Peter Bringle, and she gave me this big
smile which she has. So she went to share her story,
and I listened, and I was devastated by all I heard.
I was hugely emotionally upset by the tragedy of her

(59:20):
what had happened to her, And I knew that I
had to talk to her. I just knew I had
to speak with her. This was somebody who would understand
my situation just as I understood hers. And so afterwards
I said, I'd like to talk with you, and she said, yes,
so did I. She said, but I'm leaving in an hour.
I said, where are you going? And she said, we
have to go to Cork. She was traveling around the

(59:41):
country with the second the Secretary of Amnesty Ireland, Mary Lawler,
and she had to be in Cork the following evening
for the a g M of Amnesty. That's about five
hours away from where we were. So I said to her, well,
if you stay over and I hear Galway, I guarantee
I'll get you there in time for your meeting. And

(01:00:03):
so we did, and I took her down to the countryside,
showed that all the sights and we got the car
and she did her talk when we were crossing the
River Shannon on the car ferry and Chris, our friend
had given us a pack lunch and he was a vegetarian,
both vegetarians at the time, and so we had this
pack lunch and Sunny turned to me and she said,

(01:00:24):
what's your interest in all of this? I said to her, well,
I was around a convicted and sentence to that too.
I spent almost fifteen years in prison. Believe. I couldn't believe,
Yea said, She said, we just seem to have come
out of it. Okay. She said, how did you get through?
And I said, well, yoga and meditation, Jesus, and that's
what she had used as well. And I said that
to her. She just lit up and said, oh my god,

(01:00:46):
yoga and meditation. So then when we were driving down
after that from the car ferry down the cark, we
were sharing our story with each other. It was the
most amazing journey I've ever had in my life because
we were at various stages. We were laughing our heads off,
we were crying our eyes out. It was a hugely
emotional trip to all the way down the road as

(01:01:07):
we shared things with each other, and we we teach
other goodbye. We said we keep in touch, and we did,
and so our relationship developed and now truly what is
going only be considered a full circle occurrent. Sunny and
Peter now run a thing called the Sunny Sanctuary, and
the Sunny Sanctuary is a truly a sunny sanctuary, although

(01:01:30):
it's not that much sun in Ireland, but it's a
sanctuary if everyone thinks it rains all the time, but
it doesn't know so um, and you have a lot
of nice golf courses over there. So Sunny and Peter
run the Sunny Sanctuary where they have found an extraordinary
way of sharing their experience and creating a positive outcome

(01:01:52):
from all this uh negative which is which is a
weak word to use for what's gone on in your lives,
and that they now bring newly exonerated people over to
stay with them and they're able to share their experiences
and learn anything from yoga to farming to just being.

(01:02:13):
How do people they want to give to the Sunny Sanctuary?
How do people? Is there? What's the website? Yeah, there's
a website. It's called the Sunny Center, the Sunny Center,
and that's s U n n y um the Sunny
Center and there's sunny is It's sunny Center dot com,
dot com and and the website that it describes how

(01:02:33):
you can donate, if you can rate and so, and
you're just doing such incredible work. Yes, that's what we do,
and that's what we love doing. And it's not just
heating for the exonerities for it's heating for us too.

(01:02:58):
Don't forget to give us a fantas sick review wherever
you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm a
proud donor to the Innisis Project and I really hope
you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and
helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project
dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and

(01:03:20):
Kevin Wardis. The music on the show is by three
time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal
Company Number one