Syracuse, NY (AP) —The conviction of rape at the heart of memoirs by award-winning writer Alice Sebold was a serious flaw in the 1982 prosecution by authorities, and the wrong person was sent to jail. It was overturned because of concern about it.
Anthony Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison, was cleared on Monday by a judge who raped Sebald when he was a student at Syracuse University, the assault she wrote in the 1999 memoir “Lucky.” ..
When the Syracuse judge revoked the conviction at the request of the prosecutor, he trembled emotionally and sobbed when his head fell into his hand.
“I never thought I would be exonerated,” said 61-year-old Broadwater after the court, the Syracuse Post Standard reported.
Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick told Judge Gordon Cuffy of the State Supreme Court that Broadwater’s indictment was unjustified.
“I’m not going to pollute this procedure by saying’I’m sorry’, it doesn’t cut it,” Fitzpatrick said. “This should never have happened.”
Sebald, 58, wrote “luckily” that he was raped in Syracuse in May 1981 as a freshman and found a black man on the street a few months later.
“He was laughing as he approached. He recognized me. For him, he took a walk in the park. He met an acquaintance on the street,” wrote Caucasian Sebald. “Hey, girl,” he said. “Don’t you know you from somewhere?”
She said she didn’t respond. “I saw him in person. I knew his face was above me in the tunnel.”
Sebald went to the police, but she didn’t know the man’s name, and the first sweep of the area couldn’t find him. Police officers suggested that the man on the street must have been Broadwater, probably seen in the area. Sebald gave Broadwater the pseudonym Gregory Madison in her book.
However, after Broadwater was arrested, Sebald could not identify him in the police lineup and chose another man as the attacker. Kill me by name and then kill me. “
Nonetheless, Broadwater was tried and convicted in 1982, largely on the basis of two pieces of evidence. As a witness, Sebald identified him as her rapist. And experts said that microscopic hair analysis linked Broadwater to crime. Since then, this type of analysis has been considered junk science by the US Department of Justice.
“If you sprinkle junk science on misidentification, it’s the perfect recipe for an illegal conviction,” Broadwater lawyer David Hammond told The Post Standard.
A message to Sebald for comment was sent through her publisher and her copyright agency.
Broadwater remained on the New York Sex Criminal Registration after completing his sentence in 1999.
The district attorney personally apologized to Broadwater before the court hearing.
“I couldn’t help crying when he told me about the wrong thing that happened to me,” Broadwater said. “In this case, the relief that a district attorney of that size supports me, it’s so deep that I don’t know what to say.”
In addition to “Lucky”, Sebald is the author of the novels “Lovely Bone” and “Ormost Moon”.
“The Lovely Bones,” about the rape and murder of teenage girls, won the American Bookstore Association’s Adult Fiction Award in 2003 and became the movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci.
“Lucky” was also in the process of adapting to the screen.
It was thanks to the film project that Broadwater’s beliefs were overturned 40 years later.
Tim Mucciante, who owns a production company called Red Badge Films, had signed as executive producer of the film, but was skeptical of Broadwater’s guilt because it was so different from the book when the first draft of the script came out. It became a target.
“I started looking around and tried to figure out what really happened here,” Mucciante told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
After dropping out of the project, Mucciante said he hired a private detective to contact Hammond and Melissa Swarts of Syracuse-based company CDH Raw.
Hammond and Swarts acknowledged that Fitzpatrick had a personal interest in the case and understood that scientific progress had questioned the use of hair analysis.
In the light of Broadwater’s immunity, the fate of the movie “Lucky” was unclear. The message for comment was left to Netflix and Jonathan Bronfman of Toronto-based JoBro Productions, who took over the executive producer.
Sebald said the two men looked “almost the same” when he was informed that he had chosen someone other than the man he had previously identified as the rapist.
She writes that she realized that the defense would be: “A panicked white girl saw a black man on the street. He talked to her intimately, and in her mind she tied this to her rape. She was wrong. Was blaming the man. “
Author Alice Sebold’s 1981 Rape Overturned Conviction | WGN Radio 720
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