Unlisted Innocents | Sojourners

Unlisted Innocents

Letter to the Editors

I wonder how many more people would be on the Innocence List of inmates wrongfully sentenced to the death (“The Innocence List,” by Kimberly Burge, April 2012) if Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs and people like her were included. (Her story, along with six others, was famously told in the award-winning play “The Exonerated” and in the movie based on it, where she was beautifully played by Susan Sarandon.) Apparently she does not qualify because, after the true murderer admitted his guilt, she accepted an offer by the district attorney to enter a plea (in which Jacobs did not have to admit guilt) to second-degree murder. Shouldn’t the requirements to qualify for this list, which is doing so much to help change public opinion, be expanded to include the Sunny Jacobs of this world?

Jim Shanahan
Landenberg, Pennsylvania

This appears in the July 2012 issue of Sojourners
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