Being in the wrong place at the wrong time cost Sunny Jacobs 17 years of her life, five of them on death row. But, she tells Rosita Boland, staying positive has led to a happy ending
'Somewhere inside all of us, there is the stuff of heroes," insists Sunny Jacobs. "When you're put into a horrible position that you can't imagine - too terrible to imagine - and then you find something inside you never knew was there. It's out of that stuff that you forge your identity when you're in a life- threatening situation."
When you think of the actions that define a hero, do you think of firemen, or athletes or even whistleblowers? Or how about spending 17 years in an American prison for a crime you did not commit, five of those in solitary confinement on death row? Knowing that your partner, with whom you had been arrested and who was also finally exonerated, had been executed in the interim? Losing your children to care, one 10-months-old at the time of your arrest? And somehow, surviving all of these unspeakably horrific experiences with your spirit intact, and no bitterness for the injustices done to you.
Jacobs is sitting in the foyer of a Galway hotel, drinking tea, and laughingly showing off her new hat. She likes it so much she's wearing it indoors. She's very slight, and although her face is animated with laughter, it also looks worn and, I bizarrely find myself thinking, somehow very exposed. Our faces are probably the most public parts of our bodies: on show to all so often that they blend in, unless of course they're famous faces familiar to us through the media. While the tea is being poured, I can't stop looking at Jacobs's face and puzzling over why it is that it seems, well, exposed.
It's only later it strikes me that, although your spirit can endure intact after 17 years of wrongful imprisonment, perhaps your body betrays those stolen years in unconventional ways. If, for 17 years, you have seen and been seen by only a very few people, it's not really surprising that your face thereafter will carry some imprint of exposure in it: a film left undeveloped for many years.
In 1976, Sunny Jacobs, her partner Jesse Tafero and two children, Eric (aged nine) and Christina (10 months) took a lift to Palm Beach, Florida, with a man called Walter Rhodes. They did not know that he had a criminal past and was on parole. At one point on the trip, they were stopped and the car searched. A gun was discovered - a clear violation of Rhodes's conditions of parole. He panicked, shot dead both policemen and sped away in their car. When he was picked up, he testified that Jacobs and Tafero had carried out the double murder.
Jacobs and Tafero were laid-back hippies, vegetarians who practised yoga. They were also broke. Unable to afford legal representation, they both ended up in prison in Florida. Both of them were on death row. Their children were taken in by Bella and Herb Jacobs, Sunny's parents, but not before Eric had first spent two months wearing shackles in juvenile detention while the authorities tried to force a witness statement of murder from him.
AFTER FIVE YEARS on death row, during which time Jacobs kept thinking the nightmare would end at any moment, her sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment. Her parents took their first holiday in five years, leaving the children with friends.
"It was the first time they had been able to go away in five years," Jacobs explains, "because until then, they could have got the call at any time that I was about to be executed."
Their plane set off from North Carolina to Las Vegas, stopping at Louisiana to refuel. When it took off again, it crashed. All 300 people on board were killed.
Tafero was executed 15 years into their imprisonment in an infamous and horribly botched execution, which took three attempts. Kept separate, they had only seen each other after imprisonment at their trial. They were never to touch again. They were allowed a 10-minute phone call just prior to his execution. Two years later, then aged 45, Jacobs was exonerated and released.
The foyer of the hotel we're in is airy and bright, with pink velvet sofas and copies of Vogue left on coffee tables. It is frankly surreal to be hearing such a terrible testimony in such a pretty place: brutal phrases such as "death row" interspersed with civilised requests for more tea. Yet the truly astonishing thing about it all is that instead of feeling utterly crushed by Jacobs's story, it's impossible not to feel inspired instead, because of the way she has dealt with the injustice done to her, both during and after her incarceration.
Jacobs made a conscious decision right from the beginning that she was going to do her best to survive psychologically.
"At first it was for my children," she says. "Because I was sure it wasn't going to take more than a few months to work out they had made a horrible mistake. During that time I wanted to make myself the best person I could be, by not becoming bitter or fearful, so that when I got out, I would have something left to give to my children. But then, as the years passed, I started doing it for myself, so that no matter what happened, at least there would be a me."
When she was finally released, she decided not to look back. "It was very important, that choice I made to heal, rather than to spend the gift of a new life that I had looking backwards at the wrongs that were done to me. And I was able to share that with my children. It meant I am leaving them a legacy of hope and strength rather than defeat and pain."
There are currently 120 people in the US, who, like Jacobs, were on death row and then later exonerated. What does she think of George Bush, and his view of the death sentence? There is a small and pointed silence.
"I pray for George Bush every day," Jacobs says eventually. "And I pray for peace every day, especially for the children. You see, it's the children who suffer most from injustice everywhere. My children suffered the most. I didn't suffer the most, my children did. I had 24-hour-a-day security. My meals were cooked for me. My bed was given at night. But when my parents died, the world was a really cruel place for my children."
After his grandparents were killed, Jacobs's son, by then aged 14, went out on his own and supported himself by becoming a pizza delivery boy. Her daughter, aged six, was taken into care. Jacobs has a close relationship with both of them now, "but that's because I made the choice to heal, rather than to hang on to the past and look for compensation and be angry". (She has never been officially pardoned, nor granted compensation.)
When she got out of prison, she "lived on the generosity and curiosity of other people for a while. Then I got myself together". An old friend invited her to stay in Los Angeles, and she moved there, taught yoga and campaigned for human rights.
"Being in prison doesn't prepare you for a lot in the outside world," she says. "So in some ways I had huge disadvantages. But in other ways, I had huge advantages because I knew what was really important in life . . . Love. Peace. Kindness. Being true to yourself."
SEVEN YEARS AGO, Amnesty International heard Jacobs speaking at a human rights conference in Texas and invited her to come and speak in Galway. Opposite her in the hotel is her Irish partner, whom she met on that trip and with whom she has lived in the west for five years now.
"The stone in the west of Ireland makes me feel grounded; it anchors me," she says.
Amnesty members were not the only people to hear Sunny Jacobs tell her story. In 2000, American playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen started putting together a piece of theatre involving the true testimonies of people, including Jacobs, who had been on death row and exonerated. The end result, The Exonerated, ran for more than 600 performances in New York, with a rotating cast of stars in the six parts, among them Danny Glover, Vanessa Redgrave, Mia Farrow, Susan Sarandon, Gabriel Byrne, Alanis Morissette, Aidan Quinn and Jeff Goldblum. A huge hit, it went on to play London and Edinburgh and comes to Ireland next month as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
"At first it was part of my healing process to talk about my story. It got painful at times, but it needed to be told," Jacobs says. "Now, because the play took on such a life of its own, it allowed us - the exonerated - to step back. So we don't have to go around talking about it so much any more, because the play does that for us. Not only does it educate far more people than we could ever get to, but it gives us a chance to step back from it."
Occasionally, Jacobs plays herself, which must be an extraordinary experience for an audience. "I most likely will play my own part for some portion of the run in Dublin - if they fit me in between the stars!" she jokes.
There will also be a memoir. Her book, Stolen Time, is finished and will be published next spring by Random House. "I always feel so badly at the end of the play," Jacobs says. "The audience is devastated by what they have just seen and heard and I always feel badly that I can't tell them the good news. The best part of my life: about how my life continued. Now, through the book, I can bring them forward and let them know that my life does have a happy ending - and that it keeps getting better and better. Even if life knocks you down and takes everything away, if you manage to hang on to your belief and you don't give up, you can not only survive, but thrive."
The Exonerated runs from Sept 29 to Oct 14 at Liberty Hall Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival; www.dublintheatrefestival.com