Two exonerated death row inmates discuss their life-changing ordeals

By Courtney Potts '06

"In 1980 I was wrongly accused, tried, convicted and sentenced to death for capital murder." That is how Peter Pringle, who served almost 15 years in an Irish prison for a murder he did not commit before being exonerated, began his presentation to a crowd made up mostly of Cornell law students in Myron Taylor Hall's Moot Court Room Feb. 28.

Pringle appeared along with Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, who also was proven innocent after serving time on death row in the United States for a crime she didn't commit. They were part of a program sponsored by the Law School's Cornell Death Penalty Project. Titled "The Exonerated," it aimed to help law students understand what can happen when people are wrongly convicted of capital crimes.

Pringle and Jacobs met in Ireland in 1998 while Jacobs was speaking at an event sponsored by Amnesty International. Although the details of their individual cases were different, they saw many similarities in their experiences, leading Pringle to declare that "the face of injustice is the same ... in Ireland or anywhere else." The pair began traveling together to share their stories with audiences around the world.

In Pringle's case, two police officers were killed in a shootout following a bank robbery in Ballaghdereen, Ireland. The perpetrators fled the scene. Pringle was later picked up by police and charged with the crime, despite the fact that there was no evidence linking him to it. At his trial, police officers falsely claimed that he had confessed to the robbery during interrogation. Pringle was sentenced to death, despite the fact that when another officer was asked to identify the man he had seen at the scene of the crime, he pointed not at Pringle but at a bystander in the public gallery.

Pringle spent the next 14 years fighting to prove his innocence. At one point, his lawyers told him to plead for forgiveness, but he wouldn't take their advice. "I refused to allow [the plea]," he said. "I would not plead for clemency for something that I didn't do." Instead, Pringle decided to serve as his own counsel and had friends send him the legal papers that he needed to study to craft his defense. After winning access to the documents used against him in court, he was able to show that his alleged confession had actually been written down in an accusing officer's notebook prior to Pringle's interrogation. In 1995 he finally was exonerated and released.

Jacobs told a similar story of a flawed legal system, this time in the United States. She and her husband were arrested when a man whom they and their children were traveling with shot and killed a policeman after he approached their car at a rest area in Florida. That man, who was on parole at the time of the incident, secured a plea bargain by falsely testifying against Jacobs and her husband, who were both sentenced to death as a result. At the time, Jacobs was 27 and had a 9-year-old son and a 10-month-old daughter. At one point, prosecutors offered to release her if she would implicate her husband, who by that time had already been executed. Jacobs refused. She was eventually released on a different plea after having served 17 years in jail, five in solitary confinement. "By the time it was resolved," she said, "I was an orphan ... I was a widow ... and I was a grandmother."

Both Pringle and Jacobs talked about the extreme emotional stress brought on by their ordeals. "[Before this happened], I believed in truth and justice and the American way, and I believed that God wouldn't let this happen to us," Jacobs said. "The worst part [of being convicted] was that everything I had been taught to believe in was gone ... right and wrong didn't matter."

Pringle admitted to having considered suicide, but said that he didn't want his family to have to deal with that stigma. "I knew that if I killed myself they'd say that I'd done it out of guilt," he explained. Instead, both he and Jacobs turned to meditation and yoga as a way of dealing with their emotions.

Jacobs also turned to the Bible for inspiration. "I chose to believe in God because without God it was hopeless. So really, I chose to believe in hope," she explained.

Jocelyn Getgen '00, J.D. '07, was very moved by the pair's speeches. "Their ability to turn a horribly negative situation into something so positive ... was just very inspirational," she said. "You can't walk away from a speech like this and not feel some sort of hesitation about sending somebody to death."

Courtney Potts is an intern with the Cornell News Office.