Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs, 77, died in the fire on Tuesday morning alongside Kevin Kelly, a man in his early 30s understood to be her carer.

Ms Jacobs and her husband Jesse Tafero were both sentenced to death in Florida in connection with the murder of two police officers in 1976.

A third man who was present at the shootings, Walter Rhodes, testified against the couple as part of a plea deal which saw him given a lesser sentence of life imprisonment.

Mr Rhodes went on to change his story numerous times in the following years — at times saying he was the one who shot the two officers, and at times insisting it had been Ms Jacobs and Mr Tafero.

Mr Tafero made headlines in 1990 when his execution by electric chair was botched, with witnesses describing flames erupting from his head during a process which lasted several minutes.

According to the Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) within Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, the incident contributed to Florida’s switch from the electric chair to lethal injection in 2000.

Ms Jacobs, who maintained her innocence and pursued numerous appeals during her incarceration, was granted a new trial in 1992 and was freed after accepting a plea deal.

She became a campaigner against the death penalty and came to Ireland in 1998 to speak at an event hosted by Amnesty International.

At that event, she met Peter Pringle, an Irish man who was sentenced to death for the murder of two gardaí in 1980 before being exonerated in 1995.

The pair bonded over their shared experiences and started a relationship, later marrying and then establishing the Sunny Center, a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting exonerees, which she continued to run after her husband passed away in 2022.

Her story was turned into a stage play called The Exonerated in 2002, later adapted for TV in 2005, with Susan Sarandon playing her part.

An investigation into the cause of the fatal fire is ongoing.