Twenty-five years of Executions and Twenty-Five Executions with Reasonable Doubts: A Brief Analysis of Some post-Gregg v. Georgia Executions

Twenty-five years of Executions and Twenty-Five Executions with Reasonable Doubts: A Brief Analysis of Some post-Gregg v. Georgia Executions
by Karl Keys*


[2] Jesse Tafero (Florida) Tafero was sentenced to death along with Sonia Jacobs for the murder of two policemen at a highway rest stop in 1976. A third co-defendant received a life sentence after pleading guilty and testifying against Jacobs and Tafero. A childhood friend and filmmaker, Micki Dickoff, then became interested in Jacobs case. Jacobs's conviction was overturned on a federal writ of habeas corpus in 1992. Following the discovery that the chief prosecution witness had failed a lie-detector test, the prosecutor accepted a plea in which Jacobs did not admit guilt, and she was immediately released. Jesse Tafero, whose conviction was based on much of the same highly questionable evidence, had been executed in 1990, two years before the evidence of innocence had been uncovered.