Sunny, her partner Jesse Tafero, and their two children were on vacation when they had car trouble and accepted a ride home from Walter Rhodes, who was on probation.

While they were at a rest stop on the Florida Interstate, two police officers approached the car to do a routine license and registration check and someone in the car shot them. Sunny stated that she was in the back seat of the car shielding her children and did not see what had happened.

The state charged all three adults with the murders. Gunpowder tests showed that Rhodes had fired a weapon; tests of Sunny and Jesse were inconclusive. Rhodes told the prosecutors that Sunny and Jesse had killed the officers and agreed to testify against them in exchange for a life sentence. Rhodes took a polygraph test, which the prosecutor claimed he passed, and this was used as the basis for giving Rhodes the deal.

Sunny had never been in trouble with the law and was shocked when she was charged with murder. She was terrified as she watched the state take away her children and in her first police statement she lied and said she didn’t know the two men, who had picked her and her children up hitchhiking. The prosecutor later used this lie to impeach Sunny’s claim that she had not shot the officers.

At her trial, the prosecutor presented Rhodes’ testimony, Sunny’s lie and the testimony of a jailhouse informant, in prison on drug charges, who claimed that Sunny had told her that she was “glad she had killed those cops,” to convince the jury of Sunny’s guilt.

The jury convicted both Jesse and Sunny. They sentenced Jesse to death but sentenced Sunny to life. However, the judge, a former Florida State Trooper who wore his old patrol hat to work and kept a miniature electric chair that gave off sparks on his desk, overrode the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Sunny to death. On appeal, Sunny’s death sentence was changed back to life imprisonment.

During the next several years, Rhodes recantedhis testimony three times and admitted that he, not Sunny or Jesse, had shot the officers, but this evidence was not made available to Sunny, Jesse, or their lawyer (an underpaid court-appointed attorney). Sunny and Jesse’s convictions continued to stand.

In 1990, Sunny’s childhood friend, filmmaker Micki Dickoff, obtained the results of Rhodes’ polygraph test, which showed that Rhodes had failed the test, but more importantly, that he had given an explanation of the crime that contradicted his trial testimony.

Had the defense had this information, they could have used his inconsistent statements to impeach him. Micki also tracked down the jailhouse informant who admitted that she hadlied about Sunny’s “confession” in order to get a deal in her own case. With this new information Sunny’s conviction was finally reversed. Yet the state of Florida was unwilling to dismiss the case altogether. Sunny wanted to get out of prison as soon as possible and did not want to wait for another trial so she entered into an agreement with the state in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, with the proviso that she could maintain her innocence. On Oct. 9, 1992, she walked out of jail a free woman.

Unfortunately, Jesse never had a chance to prove that his conviction and sentence should have been reversed as well. On May 4, 1990, the state of Florida strapped Jesse into the electric chair. It took three jolts of electricity to kill him. During that time his head caught on fire and two witnesses observed him breathing for several minutes before he died.

Exonerated while co-defendant, convicted on similar evidence, went to the electric chair

Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs and Jesse Joseph Tafero, the father of the younger of her two children, were tried separately, convicted, and sentenced to death by the same judge for the 1976 murders of two law enforcement officers at a rest stop off of Interstate 95 in Broward County, Florida.

Jacobs, Tafero, their 10-month-old daughter, Jacobs’ 6-year-old son, and Walter Norman Rhodes, a friend of Tafero’s, were sleeping in a car that was approached by Phillip Black, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper on routine patrol. With Black was a friend, Donald Irwin, a vacationing Canadian constable.

The murder and kidnaping

After Black learned via radio that Rhodes had a criminal record, gunfire broke out. Black and Irwin were slain, and the group sped off in the Black’s patrol car, driven by Rhodes. At a nearby apartment complex, Rhodes commandeered a car and kidnapped the man in it, Leonard Levinson. They were captured a little later when Rhodes lost control of the car in an attempt to evade a police roadblock.

Jacobs and Tafero maintained from the beginning that Rhodes had shot the officers, and that they had no choice but to go along with him after the shooting. Although there were two eyewitnesses to events surrounding the murders, neither contradicted Jacobs’ and Tafero’s version of what happened. Nor was their version contradicted by physical evidence. Both Tafero and Rhodes had gunpowder residue on their hands, a fact that was consistent with Tafero’s claim that Rhodes handed him the gun after shooting the officers. There was no gunpowder residue on Jacobs’ hands.

The convictions and sentencing

The convictions of Jacobs and Tafero rested primarily on the testimony of Rhodes, who was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. In Jacobs’ case, the prosecution also presented the testimony of a jailhouse informant, Brenda Isham, who claimed Jacobs had confessed.

The trials were surrounded by massive publicity, which was overwhelmingly prejudicial. All prospective jurors acknowledged knowing about the case, and neither jury was sequestered. The jury in the Jacobs case recommended a life sentence, but Judge M. Daniel Futch, Jr. imposed death, as he had done earlier in the Tafero case. Futch, known as “Maximum Dan,” was a former Florida Highway Patrol trooper who kept a miniature replica of an electric chair on his desk.

The appeals

In 1978, the Florida Supreme Court temporarily relinquished jurisdiction of Jacobs’ case, directing Futch to hold a hearing on whether the Broward County State Attorney had improperly withheld exculpatory evidence during pretrial discovery, including reports stating that Rhodes had told a prison guard that he alone shot the officers and that he had given answers during a polygraph test that were inconsistent with his trial testimony. Jacobs v. State, 357 So. 2d (1978).

Futch found no merit in Jacobs’ claims, saying that Rhodes’ purported statement to the prison guard had been equivocal and that it was impossible to establish precisely what Rhodes had said during the polygraph examination because there was no verbatim transcript of the questions and answers. The results of the polygraph itself, which Rhodes failed, had been properly withheld because, as a matter of law, polygraph results were not discoverable.

Jacobs’ death sentence vacated

In 1981, the Florida Supreme Court agreed that the discovery issues did not warrant a new trial, affirming Jacobs’ conviction. However, the court commuted her sentence to life in prison, holding that Futch had lacked sufficient basis to override the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence. Jacobs v. State, 396 So. 2d 713 (1981).

Tafero was not so lucky. He remained on death row, despite growing doubts about the credibility of prosecution’s star witness. Both Tafero and Jacobs then sought federal writs of habeas corpus. His was denied, Tafero v. Wainwright, 796 F.2d 1314 (1986), but Jacobs won a hearing before a federal magistrate.

During that proceeding, Brenda Isham, the jailhouse informant who had helped send Jacobs to death row a decade earlier, admitted that she had committed perjury at the trial and that Jacobs, in fact, had not confessed. Isham said that, before she agreed to testify, detectives had warned her that she might “make an enemy” of the Broward County State Attorney if she refused to testify against Jacobs.

Tafero’s macabre execution

Jacobs’ petition for a writ of habeas corpus was still pending when, on May 4, 1990, Tafero was put to death in the Florida electric chair. Officials interrupted the execution three times because flames and smoke shot out of his head. During the first interruption, he continued to move and breathe.

Shortly before the execution, filmmaker Micki Dickoff had initiated correspondence with Jacobs. The two had been childhood friends, growing up in Indiana. Dickoff soon became persuaded of Jacobs innocence and obtained affidavits used to supplement the pending habeas corpus petition, which the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit granted in February 1992. Jacobs v. Singletary, 952 F.2d 1282 (1992).

The following October, the Broward County State Attorney offered to release Jacobs if she would enter a plea in which she did not admit guilt. Otherwise she faced a re-trial and possibly another death sentence. She took the plea deal and was released.

Dickoff made a documentary on the case entitled “ In the Blink of an Eye,” which aired as an ABC movie of the week in 1996.