Stolen Time: One Woman's Inspiring Story as an Innocent Condemned to Death

Stolen Time: One Woman's Inspiring Story as an Innocent Condemned to Death

by Sunny Jacobs

Doubleday, HK$247

Love is blind, says Florida death row survivor Sunny Jacobs. This is now known to be true because brain circuits responsible for critical social assessment and negative emotions are literally switched off when you fall for someone.

Rarely can a nicer person have fallen for a dodgier man than Jesse Tafero, the true-life antihero at the heart of Stolen Time. To snare Jacobs, the 'lean and hungry' ex-con lured her then-boyfriend into cocaine, provoking estrangement between the couple. Tafero then seduced her, becoming her common-law husband.

One night in 1976 after their car broke down, the pair and their children were taking a lift with one of Tafero's ex-con friends, Walter Rhodes. In the small hours after the group had pulled over for a nap, trooper Phillip Black and visiting Canadian Constable Donald Irwin stopped for a routine check. Rhodes flipped. 'The sudden blast of gunfire erupted,' Jacobs writes, 'filling the world with deafening force.'

Both officers died. The next thing the hippie vegetarian knew, despite expecting to be treated like a victim, she was branded a 'cop killer' and was in jail with three policemen outside her cell. 'They could beat me to death and I could scream my head off and no one would know ... They could try to hang me from the fluorescent light. They could drown me in the bathroom.' When they entered, they were unarmed 'except for the hatred in their eyes'.