PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Mr. Broadwater left prison in 1998 and was struggling to put his life back together when “Lucky” was published. His effort to start anew was hampered by the requirement that he register as a sex offender. Eventually, in part because of doubts raised by a planned film adaptation of the memoir, he hired Ms. Swartz and her colleague J. David Hammond to clear his name. In their motion to vacate the conviction, they argued that the case had relied entirely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of him in court and on a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis. William J. Fitzpatrick, the current Onondaga County, N.Y., district attorney, joined the motion to vacate the conviction. He noted that witness identifications of strangers, particularly across racial lines — Ms. Sebold is white; Mr. Broadwater, Black — are often unreliable."
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STORY: "Man Exonerated in Alice Sebold Rape Case to Get $5.5 Million," by Reporters Ed Shanahan and Karen, published by The ...March 27;
Anthony J. Broadwater spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted in the assault in Syracuse, N.Y., which Ms. Sebold, a well-known novelist, described in her memoir “Lucky.”
New York State has agreed to pay $5.5 million to a man who spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of raping the author Alice Sebold when she was a college student in Syracuse, N.Y., lawyers for the man said on Monday.
The agreement would end a lawsuit filed by the man, Anthony J. Broadwater, 62, after his rape conviction was vacated in November 2021 by a state court judge who concluded that the case against Mr. Broadwater was deeply flawed.
The settlement was signed by lawyers for Mr. Broadwater and from the office of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, last week. It still requires a judge’s signature, but one of Mr. Broadwater’s lawyers, Melissa Swartz, said that the judge, Ramón E. Rivera of the state’s Court of Claims, had verbally approved it last month.
“I appreciate what Attorney General James has done and I hope and pray that others in my situation can achieve the same measure of justice,” Mr. Broadwater said in a statement on Monday. “We all suffer from destroyed lives.”
Ms. Swartz said that Mr. Broadwater was particularly glad that the state’s lawyers had not insisted that he sit for a deposition and revisit the events. “That would be extremely difficult for Tony to go through,” she said.
The attorney general’s office declined to comment on Monday.
Ms. Sebold was an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University when she was raped in a park near campus in 1981. She described the assault in raw detail in her 1999 memoir, “Lucky,” a precursor to her best-selling novel, “The Lovely Bones,” which also involves the rape of a teenager. In the memoir, she used the fictitious name Gregory Madison for the man who had raped her.
As she wrote in “Lucky,” Ms. Sebold told campus security about the attack immediately and then went to the police. After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she wrote, she described her attacker to the police, but the resulting composite sketch did not resemble him.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she might have seen the man who had raped her.
She subsequently identified a different man in a police lineup. She wrote in “Lucky” that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that soon after making her choice, she felt it was the wrong one. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.
Mr. Broadwater’s lawyers argued that prosecutorial misconduct had sullied the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her. The lie, Mr. Broadwater’s lawyers said, had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s testimony.
Mr. Broadwater left prison in 1998 and was struggling to put his life back together when “Lucky” was published. His effort to start anew was hampered by the requirement that he register as a sex offender.
Eventually, in part because of doubts raised by a planned film adaptation of the memoir, he hired Ms. Swartz and her colleague J. David Hammond to clear his name. In their motion to vacate the conviction, they argued that the case had relied entirely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of him in court and on a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
William J. Fitzpatrick, the current Onondaga County, N.Y., district attorney, joined the motion to vacate the conviction. He noted that witness identifications of strangers, particularly across racial lines — Ms. Sebold is white; Mr. Broadwater, Black — are often unreliable.
In 2021, Justice Gordon J. Cuffy of State Supreme Court in Onondaga County overturned Mr. Broadwater’s conviction for first-degree rape and five related charges. As a result, he was no longer required to register as a sex offender.
“It’s a long day coming,” Mr. Broadwater said then.
In addition to suing the state, Mr. Broadwater filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Onondaga County and the City of Syracuse, as well as an assistant district attorney and a police officer who were involved in prosecuting him. That case is pending.
After leaving prison, Mr. Broadwater has largely relied on temporary jobs: working at a metal plating factory, bagging potatoes, doing yardwork and roofing, mopping floors, scavenging for scrap metal. One thing he hopes to do as result of the settlement with the state, Ms. Swartz said, is buy a small house in a rural area where he and his partner can live.
About a week after Mr. Broadwater’s conviction was vacated, Ms. Sebold apologized to him in a statement posted online. She said she regretted having “unwittingly” played a part in “a system that sent an innocent man to jail.”
“I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you,” she wrote. “And I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will.”
Mr. Broadwater said at the time that he was “relieved and grateful” for the apology, that “it took a lot of courage” and that “she was a victim and I was a victim too.”
Ms. Swartz said on Monday that he still felt that way. “He has always been very empathetic toward her and continues to be,” she said.
Ms. Sebold could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/nyregion/anthony-broadwater-alice-sebold-wrongful-conviction.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith.
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
