LAST UPDATE | 3 Jun 2025

SONIA JACOBS, AN American woman who spent 17 years in prison, and five years on death row, after she was wrongfully convicted of murder, has died in a house fire in Co Galway.

Emergency services in Conamara responded to the incident this morning after a fire broke out at a bungalow near Casla.

The remains of Sonia ‘Sunny’ Jacobs, 76, and a man in his 30s, understood to be her carer, were found after the incident in Gleann Mhic Muireann.

The scene has been preserved for a technical examination. Postmortem examinations will be carried out at University Hospital Galway. The local Coroner has been informed and gardaí are appealing for witnesses to come forward.

Gerry O’Malley, chief fire officer at Galway Fire and Rescure Service, said crews were first alerted of the event at 6.19am this morning. 

A fire crew from Galway City and a water tanker and crew from An Cheathrú Rua were mobilised to the home. The first crew arrived just over 20 minutes after the first report was received, O’Malley said.

A breathing apparatus team found an elderly woman in a bedroom after first entering the home, the fire chief said. A man was found in a bedroom after that team re-entered the home.

“Sadly, both casualties were pronounced deceased at the scene,” O’Malley said.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Clifden Garda Station on 095 22500, the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.

Local Independent Ireland councillor Michael Leainde told The Journal that the event has put a “dark cloud” over the rural community in Conamara and Gleann Mhic Muireann. He sent his condolences to the families involved.

Sunny was placed on death row in Florida, in the US, in 1976 after she was wrongfully convicted of the murders of an American and Canadian police officers.

Her son was nine whilst her daughter was just ten month old when she went to prison. When Sunny Jacobs was freed in 1992 her son Eric was a married father whilst her daughter Christina was 16 years old.

Sunny Jacobs campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty.

She met Peter Pringle at an Amnesty International event in 2013 and the couple married later that year.

The pair set up the Sunny Healing Centre, in Co Clare, where they offered a space for healing and respite to individuals who had faced miscarriages of justice.

Sonia Jacobs and Peter Pringle met and married in 2013 and subsequently founded the charity The Sunny Centre, located in Co Clare. The Sunny Centre The Sunny Centre

Pringle, who died in December 2022, had been sentenced to death in 1980 in Dublin for the murder of two gardaí, John Morley and Henry Byrne, in a bank raid in Ballaghaderreen in Roscommon.

He served 15 years in jail before he was released in 1995 after his convictions for the July 1980 murders were deemed unsafe.

‘Worked tirelessly to support other victims’

Dr Edward Mathews, the director of the miscarriage of justice support and campaign group, the Irish Innocence Project, at Griffith College, has paid tribute to Sunny Jacobs.

“We are devastated to hear the news today of the death of Sunny Jacobs,” he said.

Mathews added: “She was a life long campaigner for human rights and the abolition of the death penalty, speaking all over the world of how the death penalty invariably kills the innocent and debases the whole of humanity.

“She also worked tirelessly to support other victims of miscarriages of justice and exonerees through the work of the Sunny Centre in county Clare.”

He said that, despite the brutality visited on her by the criminal justice system in the US, Sonny always displayed love, humanity and empathy to others and helped them with their trauma. 

“She will be greatly missed by our organisation, and by innocence activists and volunteers across the world,” he added.

Conviction and incarceration

Sunny and her then-partner Jesse Joseph Tafero, the father of two of her children, were tried separately, convicted and sentenced to death by the same judge for the murders of two police officers at a petrol station in Florida in 1976.

Sunny and Tafero had been travelling home to North Carolina with their two children, when their car broke down. A man named Walter Rhodes, who knew the couple, agreed to drive the family home.

Sunny and the children had fallen asleep in the car and were woken up when a police officer knocked on the window of the vehicle. The officer, Florida Highway Patrol trooper Philip Black, and his friend, Canadian constable Donald Irwin, were outside the car.

Jacobs said gunfire broke out and the two officers were killed. She and Tafero maintained throughout the trial that they had nothing to do with the murders and that Rhodes, who had been driving them, had shot the officers.

Two eyewitness accounts and physical evidence did not contradict the couple’s version of events.

Rhodes, who was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, testified that the pair had been involved in the murders, which eventually led to them being sentenced to death.

In 1981, the Florida Supreme Court commuted Sunny Jacobs’ sentence of to life in prison.

Tafero was put to death in 1990. After the execution, Rhodes confessed he had fired the fatal shots, confirming both Jesse’s and Sunny’s long-maintained innocence.

Sunny was freed in 1992 when she was 45 years old. She told the BBC in 2017 that when she went to jail when she was a “mother, a daughter and a wife” and by the time she came out she was a “grandmother, an orphan and a widow”.

Sonia Jacobs was also an author and spoke at universities and conferences. Oscar winning actress Susan Sarandon played her in the movie “The Exonerated” which was released in 2005.