I came from a beautiful neighborhood. I had a beautiful life. I went to sleep because September seventh 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 drawn, and I never saw freedom ever since after that.
It's like roach Moe Town. Once you get in, you and I can't now.
This is wrongful conviction. With Jason Flommer today we have a very special guest, Sunny Jacob's one of my favorite people in the world. Sunny Jacob's story is as crazy as it can get. Is that fair to say, Sonny?
Yeah, it is.
It's pretty crazy. So Sonny was wrongfully convicted in nineteen seventy six. I'm particularly thrilled today because joining Sonny in the studio with me is her Well. I could call you a new husband, Peter Fringle. It's a few years now, but he's still a new husband. And Sonny's daughter, Christina Tafarah, is going to speak today publicly for the first time ever. So Sonny, Peter, Christina, welcome to Ronful conviction very much, Thank you, Jase. So, Sonny, let's go back to the beginning.
You were living where at the time that this all went down.
At the time that this happened, we had been living in North Carolina, but Jesse had gone down to Florida with the promise of some work and we ended up joining him down there.
So he went down there originally to do 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 you're stranded in Florida. You got to get back home, right, right, So take us through it. What happens next? You were offered a ride, which was turned out to be a you know, the beginning of the beginning of the terrible Saga of Sonny Jacobs, which so fill us in filling the audience.
Well, the card broken down, and Jesse asked a friend of his to give us a lift, and we were going to go someplace where he knew someone where we 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 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 I was in the back 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, yeah, she was a baby. And so Jess was in the passenger seat and his friend who's driving, And then so we were sleeping in the car in the rest area. Nothing was going on, there was no crime being committed, there was no reason for anybody to.
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 you know, it looks like some of you would meet in a coffee shop or a in a theater or something. I mean, she's the least likely person to have ever served time on death road.
At the time, I was, besides being a young wife and mother. I was also a hippie, you know, like.
Still a hippie.
Yeah, cool. It was a hippie and a vegetarian. So I mean, I was totally the least likely person to be in any way involved 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 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. They pulled open the door, they took the gun, they or pulled him out of the car. Then they ordered Jesse out of the car. They took everyone's ID.
You were 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. Then they wanted Jesse's idea and he was reluctant to give it, and then they asked me from my ID. And 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, off of.
Your gun and being on parole.
Right, yeah, even in America, you're not 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, 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, I don't know how many 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 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 the car with a gun in his hand, ordering Jesse to put us into the police car. At that point we became hostages of the man who had just shot the two policemen.
Right now, it's 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 favor giving you a ride. So it doesn't get much weirder than that. And now you've got to take the kids at gunpoint and put him in a police car, that's right.
And as he helped me out of the car with the baby and with my son Eric, Eric slipped and fell into a pool of blood. Well, and that's when I saw the two policemen on the ground. So helped Eric up and we got We were put into the back of the police car, Jesse 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 the sky. He was racing down the 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, an old fellow, going out to get his mail, and the 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
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, Jesse came back and said, listen, he says, we have to go with him in this man's car. So it takes us in the transfers into what is now slightly less conspicuous in a police car, a orange Cadillac.
Oh that's great. This guy's this guy's got a flair for the dramatic.
So now this other poor man is also hostage. 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, it's a rush hour.
It's rush hour, and I could hear helicopters above, and I thought, oh my god, maybe the traffic is so bad because maybe there's a roadblock or something, and maybe that's a helicopter. And we're gonna be saved, right, You're gonna be saved.
Right, the cops are gonna come get you. Great 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 from the building to the post box and back, you know, and she saw 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, they knew that there was a woman, two children, and a man hostage in that car.
In the orange Cadillac.
Yeah, we're driving along in the orange Cadilloc. I'm 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 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 car. Holy shit, again,
we are being bomb guarded by bullets. I covered the children again, and the car was bouncing with the bullets, just like you know in the movie about Bonnie 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. The only one who's actually injured was 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's standing there, handcuffed and a cop comes from the crowd with his gun turned around with the button 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 gonna 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 gun fights. I mean, it's quite extraordinary, you know, very lucky. And she's a lovely, lovely young woman if you'd meet her now, 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 saviors anymore, because 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.
Tried to explain that we didn't know. I didn't know, like 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 or all of us, we respond and it
wasn't up to them to figure it out. It was up to them to apprehend us, 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 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 so vehement about it.
They were like, you know, like when you people are swaying, they start spitting, you know, like I could see the spit coming out in their molines when they were talking, you know, And it was it was one of the most frightening moments. And like I'm sitting there praying, like I hope the one I call in my head the voice of reason should prevail, which thing God Eventually he did, because otherwise they were nobody would have known. So he
did prevail. They decided they would take us in. Two detectives came in and they started trying to question me, and they record. In those days, they had the you know, the tape recorders with real tape, right, you know, and so they kept trying to ask me what was what happened, 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 id 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, they'd
stopped the recording and start a new recording. While we were being interrogated, the guy, the driver, the guy who actually did the killing, from his hospital bed, asked to speak to the prosecutor. Now I was this is how later I found this out. I 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 at the time was apparently had ambitions to run for 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 district attorney on the basis of his strong stance against crime. So what happened was that the killer was offered a plea bargain 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, 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 who this, they'll know and we'll go home.
By the way, I never just did the concept of three life senses. Does anyone have three lives? I don't know why in this country. It's very odd, right, I'm never like, I mean, anyway, it's very very odd. And he eventually got out. But that's another story. So it's even weird.
Yeah, that's another story. But he's also back in so just so people shouldn't how do you.
Have three lifess why didn't you give the guy one life sentence and keep them 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 is very strange. But anyway, so go ahead.
So this plea arrangement was made unbeknownst to us. And also in order 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 the plea bargain. Jesse's trial went first. He has tried, convicted, and sentenced to death
in four days. My trial lasts two weeks. 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 regular lawyers who act as who represent you as if they were the public defender, and they don't get paid a lot, so they don't always do a lot because they have other clients, they have to make a living. So and my parents were asked, actually, do you want to maybe get a hire a lawyer.
But we thought, why should they have to mortgage their home to try to get me a lawyer, because we were told even in those days, it'd be one hundred thousand dollars or more. In those days, I was a total fortune. So I said, there's no need to do that. I'm completely innocent. I mean, it's not like there was even a fingerprint, there's nothing. It was absolutely nothing against me. So we 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 position in the closing arguments. So I go, fine, 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, and Superman and all those things.
So in the second week of the trial, the jury started asking questions. 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 she and her boyfriend were arrested, and they told her that if she could help them to convict me, she
and her boyfriend would released the next day. If they couldn't, then she would go to prison for a long time, her life would be ruined, and she'd never get back to university.
Jail House snitches are actually, you know. In the most recent report from the Center for Ronful Convictions, it was shown that in almost forty six percent of the capital cases that have been overturned, forty five point nine percent, a 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 bit 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 person, you know, 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 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 non biased in a case that involved the killing a policeman if you had been part of that brotherhood yourself. But he refused to step down from the cases.
So it 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 ZIZI.
You know, let's just reflect on that for a moment. So you have a judge, this 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 zoop zoop zoop, right touching it and like almost like taunting you, right, And he's and his name was Maximum Dan.
So 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, and in the sentencing phase they have to be unanimous in order to give a death sentence. Okay, And there was one juror, and this is really important for people to know because people think, oh, 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 from the other jurors to agree with them, and 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 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 considered constitutional. Now there's only one, and
it won't shock you to know that it's Alabama. Even Florida has had it overturned, as has Delaware, which was the other holdout. So now only an Alabama can that happen, right, and judicial override has 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 percent of the death sentences
that have been overturned. So what that tells you is that the jury is very focused on, or at least interested in the idea that they may be convicting, but they may have enough of a shred of a doubt that they don't want to sentence you the death and that finality. But the judge, for whatever reason, doesn't feel
the same compunction. And in your case, it's obvious why he was a former state trooper and he was a who was a you know, a very he was maximum dan right, he was going to throw the death penalty if he was going to throw it out of vegetarian hippie like you. So anyway, so you're sentenced to death, you end up on At this point, there is no death row for women in Florida.
Right, No, no, because in nineteen seventy six there had been a three year moratorium just prior to our cases, and they had changed all the death sentences to life. So 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.
And yeah, it is a sort of a distinction, I suppose.
Yeah.
And 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 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 people. That was what that building had been used for. So there were a number of cells on each side. It was like a dungeon there, Like I'll just say six, I'm not
really sure anymore. How there were six cells on each side, and in the front there was an office where the guards would stay, and the whole building was surrounded by its own barbed wire fence. Within the 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 a day, twenty four hours a day in a tiny cell, 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 sink combination. That was all that was in the cell. I spent the first five years of the seventeen years that it took to resolve this in solitary confinement, sence to death. After five years in solitary confinement,
finally my first appeal came up. It took that long 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 they put me in the prison population, 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 a year after my sentence was changed from death to life, that's when my parents were killed at or 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.
I'm in awe of your mother. Do you 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?
That's you have to ask to kill everyone.
My mom is the most amazing person you'll ever meet.
She's my favorite. I mean, and then uh, and Peter, we haven't even gotten to you yet.
She's also the funniest woman in the world.
And so sunny. So then yes, a number.
Of things happened in the interim. 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 and death throw for what he'd done. He confessed a number of times, and 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 incons why, you know. So we didn't prevail. And when that happened, Jesse was like, this is it, babe, We're going home. You know I told you keep your spirits up. He was always trying to.
Keep my spirits up to letters. Yes, so you knew that the real killer had been bragging and it essentially confessed. Yeah, so you're like, now we're going home. I mean obviously right.
But we didn't go home.
They didn't go home. In fact, quite the opposite, and.
It was at that hearing that they 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 a very young lawyer, because my original appeals lawyer died of a heart 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.
A young lawyer who would think of that except for you anyway.
So anyway, these were two young lawyers who were mentoring under him, and they both decided 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, give me the use of a private investigator from some other CALLI in who it paid for it for one day, and I want to find the woman, the young woman who testified against me in the trial, right, the one that we
called the jail house 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, 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 she would do anything except come back to Florida.
And there's a reason why she wanted 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 use her testimony, right, So 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 sick father.
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 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 prosecutor's turn to cross examined. As he approached the bench where she said, she grabbed her chest, she started
a hyperale and she had a heart attack. And honestly, all I can think of at that moment was please God, don't let her die before a cross examination. Please, because unless we could cross examine, you can't use her testimony. Everything she said would have been for nothing. Oh my god. So anyway, the medical person came in, they brought the paramedics. They took her away in an ambulance, and we didn't
know what was going to happen. Finally she recovered. She went back to Wyoming, and the judge 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.
So meanwhile, was this before or after Jesse was executed?
That was in the eleventh year.
Right, so he was still alive.
Yes, In the fifteenth year 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 because in Jesse's case, and people may remember this because it's a very well documented and famous tragic situation. So in Jesse's case, 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 by prisoners, and there's at least a theory going around that they may have deliberately tampered with it in order to make his execution more they were like a torture, yes, because he had of course been convicted of killing two police officers. So in his case, the electric air malfunctioned, it took over ten minutes for him to die.
It 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 with an artificial one so that when they pulled the switch, instead of dying, instead of conducting the current properly.
He caught fire. Fire.
The witnesses on behalf of the media said that the flame shot two feet 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 to Farah to die.
And 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 because if you believe in the death penalty, you have to be willing to accept the idea that people like Jesse to Fara 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. So Jesse's actually.
Can't give him back to his children either.
No, you can't give him back to his children. I mean, and Christina, I mean, I can't even It's hard for me to even bring myself to ask you 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. I didn't believe it either. Now I've blacked out a lot from it, just as a coping mechanism for myself. Not blacked out. I remember a lot of things. 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, you know, coming home soon. You know, I just wanted them back. I don't think I cared. I
don't think I cared. I just wanted my parents back. It's funny because the day they killed my father, I had two friends with me and I saw them both yesterday after like twenty years. Both of them 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 on. I'm fifteen now, and my two friends, Sarah and Marvin were on my bus with me, but I 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 as she didn't know. And the next stop.
The bus driver didn't know.
The bus driver didn't know that was my father, right, So the next stop was my friend Sarah, and I'm just sitting stoic on the bus. I probably was crying.
Sarah knew.
Sarah knew what was happening, and 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 the way, 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 I didn't end up staying in school because I had an issue while I was at school and I got sent home, which I should have been home anyway, but.
I didn't know.
I didn't know about the malfunction of the chair, and I act he 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 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
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 it was a really hard visit, knowing what was going to happen to him, really emotional
visiting my grandmother, my grandma Kay, his mother. Somehow fenagled 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 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 she finagled 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 will never forget that day. Yeah, insane, and I 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 his you know, and then knowing what happened to him made it even harder. And not being told immediately too, It's like wow. And 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 on death row. There's no help at all.
I can't even talk.
Well, I'll help you out here, 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 at 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 know that instead of keeping her there and loving her and giving her that family support and letting her be perhaps with me and Grandma Kay, you know, so we could grieve together, 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 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 confined to the one person. It's
their whole family that suffers. And the people whose children have family to go to that you know, they can stay with you 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 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, right.
And could you grew up in a neighborhood like it was, upper middle class neighborhoods, So there's 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 don't want everybody to know my story because again,
you know, people are going to 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, I'm part of their family and I have brother, 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. I have double ear infections. You know, I'm on a boss to Dad's was what like seven hours up to Dad's prison. You know, I would fly by myself, and 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 in school when i'd come back
and there was an adjustment again. And you know, I just visited both my parents in prison and like that to the.
Point where apparently it felt it was just too disruptive to their lives to keep bringing her, and they stopped. So then finally, just after Jesse's execution, 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 heard what happened to Jesse. In fact, they stopped using the electric chair in Florida as a result of Jesse's execution.
For us. Yeah, I was fifteen and living in New York and I heard about it, so, you know, two 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 executed, just maybe a few hours before.
Do you remember the last thing he 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 me now.
Good answer.
So Mickey came to visit me, and she said, 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? And can I talk to a lawyer?
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 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 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 they threatened to take me to a new trial. And in those days it was just just I think I was the second person after Alfred that they did this. The Alford is a thing where they say, if you let us convict you of a lesser to charge, you don't have to plead guilty. You can maintain your 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 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. A white couch.
This is nice.
You've got orange cadillacs and white couches. I mean, this story is yeah.
I mean, you know, Nicky and Christy, my friends who were 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, a person in that position has a lot of power.
And they have 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 all the evidence, they give it over to the prosecutor. The prosecutor then decides which parts he's going to give to the defense and which parts he doesn't have to buy law gift to the defense to the defense, and then they have the trials. 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 gonna 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 wants to win, everybody wants to be the best.
And if there's nobody ever gonna 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 please thing comes up. They offered to me. They say, okay, we're having these hearings. So exactly this is interesting what happened to hearings. First of all, in the hearings, we find out about the
fact that, uh, there was a polygraph test. Now, Micky 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 a hold of the poly test, and they hire a guy who is a former policeman who's now a polygraph expert, and he takes a look at it and he says he didn't pass the polygraph test. He failed a polygraph
test where it said he passed, he actually failed. So the report that they entered saying he passed a polygraph 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 going to offer you a deal. If you'll say that the guy they made the deal with didn't do it, 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?
Your husband?
They figure will blame Jesse. He's dead anyway, right and we.
All go out and everybody's fine.
But I'm not doing that. Okay. First of all, he still has children and a mother. Second of all, they took everything from me. They took my whole life from me. They took everything from but my integrity, 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 gonna 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, I was teaching math 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, 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, 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 were dealing with so I.
Said, take me back, and they did. They took me back. Things went on usual. I went back to my job in the prison whatever. And then uh, a week or so later, I got called back on a Friday. Now you get called back to court on a Friday. They know that everybody's sure you're going home because they 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, sailor to your children. You know, you're going home. They took me back to court and I was like praying, and I was like I could almost feel my parents and Jessie 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 fit, feet coughed. I guess you'd call it. And they took me back to court and my lawyers say to me, Okay, they're offering
you this deal. Another deal. Yeah, this time they say that if you'll just allow them to read into the record, you know, a conviction of a lested degree. You don't have to plead guilty, and you can go home.
You don't have to implicate Jesse.
No, and you can go home, and 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 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 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 the outcome would be, 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 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, thiss hilarious by the way, she knows so because I can't keep my mouth if she can't. And the judges, uh.
You see what happens at one of these alpha and 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 too refute what do you say? Which is a bunch of crap.
So I'm sitting there listening to this litany just ridiculous stuff, in my opinion, and I'm trying to think what can I say.
There's gotta be something I can get away with saying. Here, So I go, you run her, and my lawyer pinches me. She's pinching me, and he goes, yes, I said I'd like a drink of water. I have a bad taste in my mouth. Wow, Bailiff, get a drink of water. I get my water. And holl is dying. So at least I said something to say something, to say 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 best one liners in the history of the world. So congratulations on that you got the last word at court right, so to speak, because you managed to give them a very sunnyish 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. Everything about you is extraordinary, But the crazy twist that life took several years ago is 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 get a life for myself and to get a persona other than the victim of injustice, and I became Sonny the yoga teacher, the happy pink dot floatner. I used to wear pink all the time because in prison you
couldn't wear nice color. So I had this pink sweatpants and pink sweatshirt and I used to run around being the yoga teacher all over Los Angeles until finally I went back into the death penalty movement again and I met some representatives of Mnescy International from Ireland, and they heard me talk and invited me to Ireland to speak.
And this is where the story gets good ending, Yes, the happy ending.
She I got this phone call one day and.
American woman who said her name was Sunny Jacobs and whom I'd never heard of, and said she was going to be given a talk three days later where I was in the town I was in, and invited.
Me to come along.
I said, what are you going to talk about? She said that dead 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 and I walked over.
To her and I said, you must be Sonny Jacobs and she said.
To me, well, 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.
What I heard.
I was hugely emotionally.
Upset by the tragedy of 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 Di, she said, but I'm leaving in an hour.
I said, where are you going? She said, we have to go to Cork.
She was traveling around the country with the Secretary of Amnesty Ireland, Mary Lawler, and she had to be in Cork the following evening for the agm of Amnesty. That's about five hours away from where we were. So I said to her, well, if you stay over and I here Galway, I guarantee I'll get you there in time for your meeting. And so we did, and I took her down to the countryside. She showed her all the sights, and we got the Cork and she did her talk.
When we were crossing the river, Shannon and the car ferry and Chris, our friend, had given us a.
Pack lunch and he was a vegetarian, of.
Both vegetarians at the time, and so we had his pack lunch and Sonny turned to me and she said, what's your interest in all of this? I said to well, well, I was wrongly convicted and sentenced that too. I spent almost fifteen years in prison.
Did you believe him?
I couldn't believe.
Yeah, she said, oh, 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 she said, oh my god, the yoga meditation. So then when we were driving down after that from the car ferry down to the Cork, 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 trift the hallway down the road as we shared things with each other and we see each other goodbye, we said we keep in touch, and we did, and so our relationship.
Developed and now, truly what is can only be considered a full circle a current. Sonny and Peter now run a thing called the Sunny Sanctuary, and the Sunny Sanctuary is a truly a sunny sanctuary, although it's not that much sun in Ireland, but it's a Sanctuary, share of it, you get our share. Yeah, it's everyone thinks it rains all the time, but it doesn't. It doesn't. So 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 from all this negative which is a weak word to use for what's gone on in your lives. And now 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 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.
That's s U n n Y the Sunny Center, and there's sunny is it Sunnycenter dot com.
Dot com And in the website that it describes how you can donate, you can and so so different ways.
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 healing for the exonerties, for it's healing for us too.
Don't forget to give us a fit tast stick review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Ennisnce Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three
time OSCAR nominatede composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one