Onetime Death Row Inmates Win Freedom and Exchange Vows
Two former death row inmates got married in New York earlier this month, united by their painful pasts.
“We have each lived a nightmare,” the bride, 64-year-old Sonia Jacobs, told a friend minutes before exchanging vows with Peter Pringle, 73. The New York Times has their story.
Jacobs was convicted in the 1976 shooting death of two police officers during a traffic stop. Jacobs claimed it was the driver, a friend of her husband’s, who shot the police, but she and her husband were sentenced to death. Her husband was executed, but Jacobs’ conviction was overturned in 1992 after the friend confessed to the murders and a jailhouse informant recanted.
Jacobs met Pringle at an event in Ireland sponsored by Amnesty International in 1998. Pringle had been sentenced to death for murdering two police officers after a bank robbery and served 15 years in prison before he was released in 1995. He later proved a police officer wrote down his “confession” before the interrogation.
