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Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
What is justice? Who does it serve? Why should you care?
When we think about justice, we think about it as an abstract, something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. Bad people. But justice and the law regulate every aspect of our interactions with each other, with organisations, with the government.
We never think about it until it impacts our lives, or that of someone close.
News, views and trues from The View Magazine, a social justice and campaigning platform for the rights of women in the justice system.
Our guests are women with lived experience of the justice system whether as victims or women who have committed crimes; people at the forefront of civic action who put their lives on the line to demand a better world such as maligned climate justice campaigners.
We ask them to share their insight into how we might repair a broken and harmful system, with humanity and dignity.
We also speak with people who are in the heart of of the justice system creating important change, climate activists, judges, barristers, human rights campaigners, mental health advocates, artists and healers.
The View believes that we can rebuild lives with hope, and successfully reintegrate people who have caused harm or been harmed, through the restoring nature of art and creativity, open dialogue and - love.
Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
E.75: Health, Healing, Hope, and Happiness – The Legacy of Sunny Pringle
We at The View were deeply saddened to learn of the untimely passing of a truly heroic justice reformer, Sunny Pringle.
Sunny was a fierce advocate for justice and a guiding light for many. Sunny survived a wrongful conviction, leading to 17 years of imprisonment, five of which were spent in solitary confinement under a sentence of death.
Sunny and her husband Peter Pringle, who was also exoneree and death row survivor, established The Sunny Center to help other Exonerees through the difficult process of building new lives after being released from prison. Together, they helped these people process their trauma and move forward with the next steps of their healing.
In this episode, we will hear an article written by Sunny for The View Magazine, talking about her experience and dedicated work. We will also be hearing from those who knew and worked alongside her, hearing the impact she had on so many people’s lives.
Learn more at: https://sunnycenter.org/
Visit the FADP at: https://www.fadp.org/
Credits
Guests: Maria DeLiberato, Bridget Maloney & Catherine O’Hara
Producer: Charlotte Janes
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We are all doing life no matter where we are. Every day must be lived to the fullest under prevailing conditions, with an eye toward betterment. In other words, don't wait until things are more ideal, because you might not get there might not get there.
Charlotte Janes:We at the View were deeply saddened to learn of the untimely passing of a truly heroic justice reformer, Sonny Pringle. Sonny was a fierce advocate for justice and a guiding light for many. Sonny survived a wrongful conviction leading to 17 years of imprisonment, five of which were spent in solitary confinement under a sentence of death. From her experience, she knew the difficulties of incarceration and the struggle to regain your footing after being exonerated and released. She used her understanding to change the lives of fellow exonerees. Sonny and her husband, Peter Pringle, who was also an exoneree and death row survivor, established the Sonny Center to help other exonerees through the difficult process of building new lives after being released from prison. Together, they helped these people process their trauma and move forward with the rest of their healing. Sunny touched the lives of everyone she met. We're releasing this podcast as a tribute to her and the powerful work she did. The following is an article Sunny wrote for our Someone's Daughter campaign, first published in our Summer 2021 issue.
Actress (Sunny Pringle):The Sunny Center began with helping one individual and really grew organically from that experience. Before the center began, we were always helping people who were having difficulty in their lives. A lawyer who knew about our past experience and the way we had learned to heal contacted us. She had a client who had been exonerated but was having great difficulty in his life. We agreed to have him come and live with us. He stayed with us for one month and was able to recover and begin a healthy life afterwards. That was the beginning.
Actress (Sunny Pringle):Today I work with a number of organizations to help women who have been incarcerated and are trying to change the current prejudices of the justice system towards women. I have spoken with organizations on most continents and the problems are the same everywhere. Women are treated more harshly across the board. Prison is merely a microcosm of society, as attitudes towards women are changing in the greater society now this is a window of opportunity to improve the way the justice system views women and the way that women are treated in courtrooms and the prisons. The Sunny Center has always had as its main focus health, healing, hope and happiness.
Actress (Sunny Pringle):In the seven years since the foundation of our organization, we have learned that housing is also a very important issue. People who have been released from prison, whether they were innocent or not, have extreme difficulty finding housing because they continue to have a criminal record. They have the same problem getting employment. For the same reason, we now provide housing for exonerees upon release from prison. Same reason we now provide housing for exonerees upon release from prison. But providing housing is not enough. It is essential to provide guidance and services as well. A person who has been in prison for a long period of time is not capable of navigating the bureaucratic maze that one has to deal with in order to even acquire identification when one is released from prison. And to make matters worse, an exonerated person is not entitled to the same help or benefits or programs that a guilty person is entitled to access. We hope to be able to provide more housing and support services in all areas of the United States, as well as in the other countries with whom we are now working. There is also an effort to start a Sunny Healing Center in Pakistan.
Actress (Sunny Pringle):At the moment, we would especially like to provide assistance to women and their children and families. There is presently no help for the children at all the children of women who are sentenced to death or to life in prison are stigmatized and shunned. They are not given any assistance to understand and come to terms with not only their mother's situation but their own status as a child of an incarcerated parent. In many countries, they simply become street children, homeless, reduced to begging on the streets in order to merely exist. One of the special prejudices that women face in the justice system is how the courts treat women coerced into crime by men. Even though they were coerced by a man, they are blamed for allowing it to happen. It is important to take into consideration the culture and the history, as well as the individual circumstances. I personally have known many women who are incarcerated for life because they were coerced into participating in a crime by a man, and in many cases the man got a lesser sentence than the woman for the same crime, even though her participation was of a lesser degree.
Actress (Sunny Pringle):Women's issues continue to become exacerbated in prison, especially regarding mental health. It is obvious that prison has become an alternative to mental health facilities. In my opinion, people with health and drug-related issues should not be put in prison at all. These are issues for social welfare and not for the criminal justice system. We are criminalizing people who should really be treated, not incarcerated. And again, in my opinion, a large percentage of the people in prison are there because their original mental health issues were not properly addressed either in the home or in school.
Actress (Sunny Pringle):I think the best model for justice in society any society is the restorative justice model. Personally, I believe that forgiveness is the key. It is the key that unlocks the doors to healing and happiness. I have found that yoga, meditation and prayer are the tools. The breath is the pathway. So we all have the tools, the pathway and the key. All you have to do is open the doors to your mind. When compassion replaces retribution, when the goal is to rehabilitate rather than to punish, when we start focusing more on the future than on the past, then and only then will we be able to move forward and make the necessary reforms to help us all move on in a healthy and happy way as a society.
Charlotte Janes:The podcast was honored to interview Marie DeLiberato and Bridget Maloney from the Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. In this conversation we were able to hear the firsthand stories and accounts of how Sunny and the Sunny Center changed the lives of exonerees.
Maria DeLiberato:I'm Marie Deliberato. I'm the executive director for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. FADP is sort of what we go by. It's a lot less words. I am also a capital defense lawyer and I've been a lawyer for 22 years practicing in Florida the whole time. I took over as executive director in June of 2022. There was an opening. We had a volunteer director, Mark Elliott, who knew Sunny as well, and he was retiring and they had the funding for a full-time director. So I took over that position in June of 2022.
Bridget Maloney:My name is Bridget. I am communications director at FADP. I came to FADP in 2021 as the very first paid quote-unquote staff member, as an administrative assistant. At that time we only had about a thousand people in our database and since then I stuck around and now have a full-time position, and things have changed a lot over the last four or five years, but a lot has stayed the same and I'm glad to have this conversation today because I came on when Mark was executive director and I've had the pleasure of hearing all of his stories about Sunny, as well as other exonerees, and how they've experienced their time with Sonny.
Charlotte Janes:Thank you both. It's amazing to have you both here. So I guess we would like to jump straight in, kind of when you first became aware of Sonny's story or when you first had almost an interaction with her.
Maria DeLiberato:So, for me as a capital defense lawyer, I was aware of her case and aware of the exoneration list of course, not too many details but I knew her co-defendant, Jesse Taffaro, who was, of course, executed by the state of Florida in a horrifically barbaric manner. I knew more, I'll be honest, about his botched execution than I did about the case or anything like that, so I was sort of aware of who she was and that she was a Florida exoneree. You know we have, of course, more than any other state in the nation. But I became sort of directly involved when I had my client, Clemente Aguirre, who is one of Florida's death row exonerees. I represented him for about 10 years and we were finally at a place where he was released in November of 2018. They dropped all the charges and then, originally, he had an ice hold and then he was able to bond out from ice detention and so he needed a place to live. And I live in Tampa and I was working with the Florida Innocence Project and the New York Innocence Project and lots of other groups trying to figure out where Clemente could go so that he could be sort of safe and have a fresh start, and they told me about Sunny House, which I didn't realize was a place that she had started, and then that it was in Tampa, and I was like, well, that's amazing, I would love to have him close by. So we made a bunch of calls. I mean, this is all happening Like Clemente was released November 5th of 2018.
Maria DeLiberato:Um, we spent a couple of days in the hotel, we took him to the beach, but then everybody has to go home. You know, all the lawyers have to go home. Um, and we're kind of. You know, I was just like all right, I guess I'm bringing you to my house. You know, there wasn't really. We weren't really sure what we were doing. And we were able to get a call, back and forth a few things, and I learned that there was a space for him in Sunny House and I was so excited and so grateful that he was going to have a place to live and a place to call his own that was so close by. So I actually have a picture. I think we posted it on our Facebook. It's all of us standing outside Sunny House where Clemente's very first home, and there were several exonerees that have lived there that were living there at the time. Another one, derek had a little dog and so Clemente got to meet his neighbors and Dorothy, who runs the Sunny Center, was so wonderful and welcoming, runs the sunny center, was so wonderful and welcoming and also like strict, in the exact way that these guys needed her to be.
Maria DeLiberato:Because, you know, clemente was wrongfully in prison for 14 years for a crime he didn't commit. He lived in a tiny nine by six cell for a decade on death row, and so freedom is scary and it was scary for him at the beginning and she was like no visitor. You know, she was very much like no visitors, no drugs, like we're not. You know, I'm not screwing around here. You guys didn't get out to like mess this up and I felt so comfortable that he was going to be in that place and, gosh, just what a remarkable thing that Sunny was able to do, understanding how difficult it is for folks when they get out to have that safe place. So I have only met Sunny, I think, one time, in person, at an event, but I am forever grateful for her and her legacy because she gave my client a place to live.
Charlotte Janes:I know you said you only met her once, but I think she changed this entire person's life who you cared so much for.
Maria DeLiberato:Yeah, I spent a lot of time picking up Clemente at the Sunny House back and forth and driving him there in the first year of his release, and he lived there for a couple of years, I want to say almost two years, so much so that we got another. There was another Florida exoneree, Paul Hildwin, who I didn't represent but a dear friend of mine did. He got out and we were able to welcome Paul there to the same, to the sort of the same lot, and it's, you know, a bunch of little buildings there, and so Paul went through there as well.
Charlotte Janes:So, in terms of the work you do, how would you say maybe solid story shaped public perception or advocacy efforts for Florida or advocacy efforts in Florida?
Maria DeLiberato:I mean her death rippled through our community in such an emotional way, just in the sense of like the suddenness of it, the tragedy of it, the immediate outpouring of like this woman changed people's lives and I think, as a death penalty lawyer and when you're as an abolitionist, I'm a little more comfortable with death than the average person.
Maria DeLiberato:So what I really, the profound thing that I feel and take away, is like she did everything she could with her life while she was on this planet and I am comforted by that, makes me cry. I am comforted by the fact that I know her spouse passed a couple of years ago and, regardless of sort of your religious beliefs or whatever, I feel comfort that they're back together and so I hope that she knows the legacy that she left here. She definitely made our world, specifically my world and my community I mean, this house is literally two miles from my house a much better place and that will always live on. So I'm grateful for her legacy. I'm saddened by her passing and yet I'm filled with hope and love for the life that she lived, despite everything that happened to her.
Bridget Maloney:And I think just briefly what Maria said, and she's had wonderful experiences with Clemente and it's very, very interesting that Mark was the head of FADP and Maria was Clemente's attorney and they sort of ended up in the same place. And one of my first experiences with Mark was on the phone with him and he was like I'm driving to the Sunny Center, derek needs dog food. And I was like who's Derek and why does he need dog food and where are we going? And he was like we're going to the Sunny Center where he has his dog. And I knew that Derek was an exoneree and I was like this place lets them have dogs. So I thought that it was called the Sunny Center because it was Florida, and now obviously I know differently.
Bridget Maloney:But but the next circumstance that I had was actually Sunny with her second husband, also a death row exoneree, and I watched a short documentary about them and her being reunited with her daughter, tina, and having, you know, created this sort of thing and finding love with Bill and what Maria said. That's why I felt like I needed to say something is that one I can't imagine coming out of somewhere like that and not wanting to just go hide, disappear, not talk about it, feel angry, and not only just that, but the fact that they're not angry and they're using that to build more community. And exactly what Maria said. We have had so many exonerees return to the prison for vigils for people who aren't innocent and who are being executed because they're like that's my threat, like we don't leave each other behind, and I always think that if people out in society who aren't on death row or wrongfully convicted like we're talking about, a relatively small group could take like a little bit of that compassion and understanding, it's like, almost when you strip away all of that identity and you're all kind of in this place together, you're able to just see each other as human beings, and I think that that's a lesson that all of us can learn.
Bridget Maloney:I, I mean we probably can't picture ourselves on death row, but if we began treating each other the way that they treated each other and and like a family, like we would, we would all be better off for that, um, and I think that that I mean it's carried through the work and so often I'll you know if. If they can do it, I certainly can do it, and if they can do it, I certainly can do it, and if they can keep showing up, I'm going to keep showing up too for them and because of them. And it's always sort of led back to that. I think it's fascinating. Fadp has sort of been that heart and soul of it, all sort of you know, coming together in that way.
Maria DeLiberato:Yeah, and I think what I know.
Maria DeLiberato:I know Clemente.... I tried to see if he was available today but I couldn't get him but what he said and I witnessed when he met Sonny at so the year after Clemente got released we got released in November that following April there's an Innocence Network conference once a year and it was in Atlanta and we Clemente was invited and I went with him and that is where I met Sonny for the first time and they do this amazing thing where they welcome all the exonerees in the nation into this family, sort of for lack of a better word and there's a presentation and a dinner and they call their names.
Maria DeLiberato:And getting to watch Clemente in a place where he had all those other exonerees around him, including Sunny. It was just so warm and amazing because, while we can all empathize right with what they've been through and the years that they've lost, watching these men and women talk to each other is like they don't even have to explain it, you know, and they have their own sort of language, like when did you come home? How long were you gone? Like the way that they speak to each other and this sort of instant camaraderie and understanding was just so amazing to get to witness and I witnessed, you know, Clemente and Sunny getting to experience that and he was so devastated by her passing. He posted on Facebook and you know he just he's like she saved my life and she did. He posted on Facebook and you know, he just he's like,
Bridget Maloney:I think, the exact same. You know, Mark would have said to me that if Sunny were here, she'd be like enough about me, more about all the rest of everybody. Come on, no, no, and I think that's what I've. What I've learned, and though I haven't met her, I have learned so much about how, using, using your figure, realizing that people are drawn to you for whatever reason it is. You know what happened to her first husband, what happened to her, what happened to her children, and really, instead of saying, yeah, like I want my story to be told, I want justification, I want, you know, revenge or whatever it is from what happened, she stepped back and she was like I don't want that, I want it to be about this and I want, when I'm gone, for it to still be about this.
Bridget Maloney:And I think that's the most important thing is that Sunny was a person, but so much more.
Bridget Maloney:She was this force that we can still have with us and we've lost many, many amazing abolitionist champions throughout history, and she will be added to that list in a memory and, like Maria said, that when we do end this one day hopefully sooner rather than later it'll be a great, great joy to say that we might have done some horrific things to her and her husband while they were here, but they also were one of the largest reasons why we were able to end this. And people are and will remember Sunny not as just the exoneree and her husband who had a horrific botched execution. They will remember them as the people who lifted exonerees up when there was no one else and really got us to the finish line. And so I just I smile, because I know that that's what she would have wanted and she would have wanted us to have this conversation and remind everybody that just because she's gone doesn't mean that Sunny House and the people who are carrying that on are gone also.
Maria DeLiberato:I mean, I think the exoneration statistics in Florida about how terrible it is. You know, we have 30 people exonerated from Florida's death row. I think that really does help shape the conversation about the death penalty. We are, of course, in a really dark period of death penalty work right now. We've had, you know, so many executions. We're up on our about to have our seventh and then our eighth execution of the year, which is far past any record you know of any previous governor.
Maria DeLiberato:So what we always keep coming back to, and I think when we ultimately win, when abolition ultimately carries the day which I know it will it will be in large part because of the times we got it wrong. And so Sunny's story about how they got it wrong for her, and Clemente's story and Herman's story and everyone else's stories really matter, and I think what also matters is the attitude that they have afterwards. Right, like Sunny could have just been bitter and angry and been like I'm not, I don't, you know, take it. But she didn't, you know. She turned what happened to her into like a voice for change, and Clemente is doing the same.
Maria DeLiberato:I mean, when he was exonerated, he stood up in court and he was like I don't have hate in my heart and I was thinking like I do, you know, like they stole his life and so, but I think the gratitude that they show not only does it highlight the problems with Florida's system, but it also humanizes the people that were locking up, and that changes the conversation, because Clemente and Sonny and all these exonerees also were incarcerated with people who were guilty. Right, there are people on Florida's death row who are guilty, but they are also more than the worst thing that they've ever done. So not only does Sonny's case and her legacy and her personality and what she did with her life when she was freed, that helps to say, look, we shouldn't have a death penalty because we get it wrong so much, but it also humanizes all the people that are there and shows that they are more than the worst thing that they have done. Some of them didn't do it, some of them did, but regardless, they're all more than the worst thing that they've ever done.
Charlotte Janes:Catherine O'Hara first came to know Sunny's story through her time as a caseworker with the Irish Innocence Project during the final year of her law degree in Dublin. Sonny's words and presence stayed with her for a long time after. We are now going to hear Catherine's story voiced by an actress.
Actress (Catherine O'Hara):I came to know Sonny's story during my time with the Irish Innocence Project and, like so many others, I was deeply moved by her courage, grace and unwavering hope in the face of unimaginable injustice. What struck me most about Sunny wasn't just her survival, it was how she chose to live. After everything she endured, she radiated compassion, forgiveness and a fierce commitment to making the world better for others. To hear her speak was to witness the human spirit at its most resilient. Though I only knew her story from a distance, it had a profound effect. It reminded me of the power of empathy, of healing, and of the quiet strength it takes to fight for justice with love at the center. Her legacy will live on in every life she touched and I feel privileged to honor her memory in this small way.
Charlotte Janes:We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Rebel Justice podcast, with the words of Sunny Pringle. The Someone's Daughter campaign features internationally respected photographers who have photographed portraits of women who have been affected by the criminal justice system, whether as prisoners, activists or professionals, portraying their stories in a fresh light and giving these women the opportunity to be rightly seen and understood as equals. You can read more about this campaign in issue four of the View magazine. To support our work and receive four digital issues and one print edition, subscribe to the View magazine for just £20 a year. Make sure to follow the View on Instagram at @the_view_magazines. You can also find us on X, formerly Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. To learn more, visit us at theview. org. uk. Thank you for listening and for keeping Sunny's light alive.