Former Inmate Discusses Struggle

Childhood friends Sonia Jacobs and Micki Dickoff, who were reunited 15 years after Jacobs was falsely convicted of murder, spoke in Merkert Hall last Wednesday night.

In 1976, Sonia Jacobs was on a road trip in Florida with her husband Jesse Tafero, their two children and Tafero’s friend Walter Rhodes.

The travelers stopped on the side of the road to sleep and were awoken by two police officers who spotted a gun on the floor of the car.

Tafero and Rhodes were taken out of the car for questioning and, in an angry altercation, the two police officers were shot and killed.

Jacobs was still in the back of the car with her children when the gunfire broke out.

She fell down over the children to protect them, and was thus unable to see what happened.

All three were apprehended by the authorities and charged with murder. Rhodes provided false testimony in a plea bargain that led to his being convicted on a charge of second-degree murder.

The state used Rhodes’s testimony to convict Tafero and Jacobs of first-degree murder; they were sentenced to death by electrocution.

Jacobs was 28 years old when she was sent to death row and spent five years there before winning an appeal to have her sentence commuted.

In 1990, Tafero was executed in a botched electrocution that lasted for 13 minutes before he was pronounced dead.

In 1991, film director Micki Dickoff learned of her friend’s imprisonment.

The two began a correspondence that inspired Dickoff to investigate the events surrounding Jacobs’s conviction.

Explaining her motivation to help her friend, Dickoff said, “we made a vow that we would always be there for each other. Little did we know 30 years later how important that vow would be.”

As Dickoff’s investigation intensified, she began to uncover dozens of inconsistencies in the state’s case; there was an inconclusive ballistics report, a police officer who had lied that Jacobs had confessed, and the fact that Rhodes (whose testimony was the state’s primary piece of evidence) had failed a polygraph test.

Dickoff’s discoveries lead to the state’s conviction being overturned and Jacobs was granted a second trial. In light of the new evidence, Jacobs was exonerated and set free.

She had spent 16 years incarcerated, and Tafero had been executed for a crime that he did not commit.

“I still have nightmares about why I came into Sonia’s life a year too late because the same evidence that exonerated Sonia exonerated her husband,” Dickoff said.

Dickoff believes that the prosecutor in the case suppressed evidence so that he could get the conviction and use the case as a stepping stone in his career.

Exposing the corrupt prosecutor was one of the indirect successes of Jacobs’s conviction being overturned.

“If you don’t hold people accountable for suppressing evidence, they will do it again and again,” Dickoff said.

Jacobs took responsibility for her lack of a “realistic” outlook on life as a young woman. She advised that young people be cautious about those with whom they associate.

“If you’re associating with someone who has been doing wrong things, then when their time comes you’re going too,” Jacobs said.

When asked if she ever feels anger at Rhodes or the prosecutor who wronged her, Jacobs said, “I made the decision that healing is more important than revenge.” Both Jacobs and Dickoff expressed their belief that the death penalty is a tool for revenge and not a valid way of dealing with societal ills.

Jacobs now spends a great deal of her time in helping innocent people on death row regain their freedom.