Stolen Time

Sunny Jacobs was only twenty-seven years old when she and her partner, Jesse Tafero, were wrongly sentenced to death by the Florida courts for the murder of two state policmen in 1976. Hidden evidence, falsified testimonies, inconclusive polygraph tests and a seemingly wanton corruption within the judicial system meant that the real murderer successfully testified against two innocents, who left behind an eight-year-old child and a ten-month-old baby. Despite the murderer, Walter Rhodes, subsequently recanting his testimony and confessing to the murder on three separate occasions, Sunny spent five years in solitary confinement on Death Row before her sentence was eventually reduced to life imprisonment, while Jesse was brutally executed via a thirteen-minute ordeal in the electric chair. Finally, after seventeen years of legal wrangling both their sentences were quashed (Jesse's posthumously) and Sunny was given back her freedom, by which time her parents were dead and her children separated and in care. Yet in this book Sunny demonstrates the human capacity for resilience and generosity of spirit. Her focus is not on the horrors she endured but on the ways in which she triumphed "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.