Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Editor’s Note: This story contains mentions of rape.

Alice Sebold published her memoir “Lucky” in 1999. In it, she described in detail being raped as a freshman at Syracuse University.

Sebold would later become known for her novel “The Lovely Bones,” a fictional story which also centers around rape. But Anthony Broadwater, the man convicted of her 1981 rape in Thornden Park near SU, maintained his innocence.

On Nov. 22, after more than 16 years in prison, Broadwater was exonerated by New York State Supreme Court Justice Roman Cuffy, who vacated the rape conviction and related counts, CNN reported.

Broadwater spent 16 years in prison for the crime after his 1982 conviction, according to CNN, and was denied parole at least five times. Since his release in 1998, he had remained on New York state’s public sex offender registry.

Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick sided with defense lawyers in the argument that the initial prosecution was flawed, syracuse.com reported.

Broadwater was charged with the crime when the then-18-year-old Sebold saw him in the street in Syracuse months after the attack. She reported Broadwater to the police after recognizing him as her attacker, CNN reported that his attorney said, but she later failed to identify him in a police lineup.

Broadwater asked an appellate court to reverse the conviction based on the lineup, but the court declined in 1984 because Broadwater and the man that Sebold picked “bore a remarkable resemblance,” syracuse.com reported.

The conviction was ultimately based on the evidence from Sebold’s recognition of Broadwater and analysis of hair found at the scene, the New York Times reported.

However, hair analysis is largely regarded to be a flawed and inaccurate forensic tool. A 2015 investigation with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project revealed that 26 out of 28 examiners with the FBI’s microscopic hair comparison unit overstated the match in a way that benefited prosecutors.

Broadwater’s other appeals included one in 1983, another in 1992 and a third in 2006, syracuse.com reported. Each of those happened before microscopic hair analysis was discredited, and each went nowhere.

According to the New York Times, the publisher for “Lucky,” Scribner, has no plans to update the text of the memoir to reflect the exoneration.

A planned film adaptation of “Lucky” shed light on the doubt surrounding the prosecution’s case, according to the New York Times, after the project’s executive producer Timothy Mucciante noticed discrepancies between the script and the representation of the story in Sebold’s memoir.

Mucciante hired a private investigator to look into the evidence against Broadwater, eventually bringing their findings to Broadwater’s lawyer, J. David Hammond.

In November, Cuffy vacated Broadwater’s designation as a sex offender in addition to his rape conviction, syracuse.com reported.

Broadwater was 20 years old at the time of his arrest. He had just returned home to Syracuse after serving in the Marine Corps in California, the New York Times said.

After his release from jail, Broadwater had a difficult time finding work because of his criminal record, CNN reported. Although his wife, whom he met after his release, wanted children, Broadwater refused. He felt it was unfair to bring a child into the world under the stigma of his conviction.

Sebold had no comment on the exoneration, the New York Times reported.

“I just hope and pray that maybe Ms. Sebold will come forward and say, ‘Hey, I made a grave mistake,’ and give me an apology,” Broadwater said to the New York Times. “I sympathize with her. But she was wrong.”

Published on November 29, 2021 at 12:18 am

Contact Richard: rcperrin@syr.edu | @richardperrins2