A man who spent 16 years in prison for a rape based on a faulty identification and junk science has finally been cleared.
Anthony Broadwater was convicted of the 1981 rape of award-winning author Alice Sebold, who detailed the alleged crime in her 1999 memoir, “Lucky.” Sebold had written that she was a first-year student at Syracuse in May 1981 when she was raped. Sebold, who is white, claimed she saw a black man months later and believed he was her attacker.
“He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street,” Sebold wrote. “‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’”
She said she said nothing in return.
“I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel,” she wrote.
She later went to the police, not knowing her alleged attacker’s name.
“An officer suggested the man in the street must have been Broadwater, who had supposedly been seen in the area. Sebold gave Broadwater the pseudonym Gregory Madison in her book,” the Associated Press reported.
Sebold was unable to identify Broadwater in a police lineup after he was arrested, instead picking the photo of a different man and claiming, “the expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me.”
During the trial, however, Sebold identified Broadwater as her attacker. The other piece of evidence that led to his conviction came from an expert who said microscopic hair analysis determined Broadwater had committed the crime. As the AP noted, that “type of analysis is now considered junk science by the US Department of Justice.”
Broadwater’s attorney, David Hammond, would later tell the Post-Standard of Syracuse: “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
Broadwater’s 16-year prison term ended in 1999, but he was ordered to register as a sex offender. Since then, he’s worked as a trash collector and handyman, though he told the AP that the wrongful conviction always hung over his head and kept him from better jobs. It also strained his relationship with family and friends.
When he married a woman who believed he was innocent, he refused to have kids.
“We had a big argument sometimes about kids, and I told her I could never, ever allow kids to come into this world with a stigma on my back,” Broadwater told the AP.
Last week, Broadwater’s conviction was finally overturned.
“I never, ever, ever thought I would see the day that I would be exonerated,” Broadwater reportedly said after his conviction was overturned.
William Fitzpatrick, the Onondaga county district attorney, said in court that Broadwater’s original conviction “should never have happened.”
“I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ That doesn’t cut it,” Fitzpatrick reportedly said. “This should never have happened.”