The rape conviction at the center of award-winning writer Alice Sebold's memoirs has been overturned.
The authorities determined that there were serious flaws in the process that occurred in 1982 and considered that the wrong man was sent to jail.
Anthony Broadwater, who
spent 16 years in prison,
was acquitted Monday by a judge of raping Sebold when she was a student at Syracuse University, an assault she wrote about in her 1999 memoir,
Lucky.
When the Syracuse judge overturned his conviction at the request of prosecutors, Broadwater trembled with excitement and sobbed, as his head fell into his hands.
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"I've been crying tears of joy and relief for the past two days,"
Broadwater, 61, told The Associated Press news agency on Tuesday.
"I'm so elated that even the cold can't cool me down," he added.
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Onondaga County Prosecutor William Fitzpatrick told state Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy at the court hearing that
the Broadwater prosecution was an injustice,
The Post-Standard of Syracuse reported.
"I'm not going to mess up this procedure by saying 'I'm sorry.'
That doesn't work, ”Fitzpatrick said.
And he condemned:
"This should never have happened
.
"
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Sebold, 58, wrote in
Lucky
that she was raped as a freshman in Syracuse in May 1981 and that months later she
saw a black man on the street who she was sure was her assailant.
He smiled as he approached.
He recognized me.
For him it was a walk in the park;
he had met an acquaintance on the street, ”wrote Sebold, who is white.
"Hello, girl," he said, as the writer recalls.
"Don't I know you from somewhere?" He asked.
She assured that she did not respond: “I looked directly at him.
I knew that his face had been the one on me in the tunnel
.
"
Later, Sebold gave Broadwater the pseudonym Gregory Madison in his book.
Alice Sebold, author of 'Lucky' in New York City.
Neville Elder / Corbis via Getty Images
The young student went to the police, but did not know the name of her attacker and, after a first search of the area, the authorities were unable to locate him.
An agent suggested that the man on the street must be Broadwater, who had allegedly been seen in the area.
But after Broadwater's arrest,
Sebold failed to identify him at a
police
recognition
parade and chose another man as his assailant.
"The expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there was no wall between us, he would call me by my name and then he would kill me," he explained.
"If you add some junk science to faulty identification, it's the perfect recipe for wrongful conviction."
Anthony Broadwater attorney David Hammond
However, Broadwater was tried and convicted in 1982 based primarily on two pieces of evidence.
On the stand, Sebold identified him as her rapist.
And
microscopic analysis of a hair
linked Broadwater to the crime, an expert said.
The Justice Department has considered this type of analysis junk science.
"If you add some junk science to flawed identification, it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction
,
"
Broadwater attorney David Hammond told the Post-Standard.
After completing his sentence in 1999, Broadwater remained on the New York sex offender registry.
The man, who has worked as a garbage hauler and handyman in the years since his release from jail, told the AP that
the rape conviction ruined his job prospects,
as well as his relationships with friends and family.
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Even after marrying a woman who believed in his innocence, Broadwater never wanted children.
"Sometimes we argue a lot about children and I told him that I could never, never allow them to come into this world with a stigma in tow," he said.
In addition to
Lucky
, Sebold is the author of the novels
The Lovely Bones
and
The Almost Moon.
The film adaptation of the book suspended
Lucky
was in the process of filming and it was thanks to the film project itself that Broadwater's conviction was overturned after four decades.
Tim Mucciante, who has a production company called Red Badge Films, had signed on as an executive producer on the adaptation, but when the first draft of the script came out, he was skeptical of Broadwater's guilt because it was so different from the book.
"I started poking around and trying to find out what really happened here," Mucciante told the AP on Tuesday.
The fate of
Lucky's
film adaptation
is unclear in light of Broadwater's exoneration.
Sebold wrote in
Lucky
that when informed that he had chosen someone other than the man he had previously identified as his rapist, he said the two men were
"almost identical."
And that he realized that his defense would be that: “A scared white girl saw a black man in the street.
He spoke to her with familiarity and in his mind related it to his rape.
He accused the wrong man. "