40-year-old Syracuse rape conviction at the heart of author Alice Sebold’s memoir is thrown out

UPDATE Nov. 30, 2021: Anthony Broadwater bursts into tears as Alice Sebold apologizes for false conviction in ‘Lucky’ rape

Syracuse, NY – A 40-year-old rape conviction at the center of a memoir by award-winning author and Syracuse University alumnus Alice Sebold was overturned by a judge Monday.

The extraordinary reversal came after Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick sided with two defense lawyers, who had asked for the dismissal based on serious flaws in the 1981 rape prosecution in Syracuse.

When the judge officially cleared Anthony Broadwater of the conviction, the 61-year-old man shook with emotion, sobbing as his head fell into his hands.

“I never, ever, ever thought I would see the day that I would be exonerated,” Broadwater said after court.

Sebold, a renowned author, began her career in 1999 with a haunting memoir “Lucky” about her rape as a freshman at Syracuse University. She later wrote “The Lovely Bones,” which became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, sold more than five million copies and became a blockbuster movie directed by Peter Jackson.

In “Lucky,” Sebold tells the story of, while walking on Marshall Street months after the attack, spotting the man she said raped her. She writes of alerting police who arrested him and later testifying against him at trial.

Broadwater spent more than 16 years in state prison for Sebold’s rape. He was released on New Year’s Day 1999, when he was 38 years old, and has remained on the state’s public sex offender registry.

Broadwater had his conviction overturned Monday based on problems at the trial recently exposed by Syracuse defense lawyers David Hammond and Melissa Swartz.

Now, he’ll be removed from the sex offender registry and -- in the eyes of the law -- it will be as though his rape conviction never existed.

Sebold did not respond to inquires before and after Monday’s hearing from Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.

The long-ago trial largely hinged on two crucial pieces of evidence: Sebold’s initial misidentification of the suspect during a police lineup and microscopic hair analysis, later deemed junk science by the federal government.

Hammond said the one-two punch of a single witness and junk science doomed the wrong man to suffer for 40 years for a rape he didn’t commit.

“Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction,” Hammond said.

In court Monday, state Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy agreed to overturn the conviction after both the defense and Fitzpatrick requested him to do so.

“I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ That doesn’t cut it,” Fitzpatrick said Monday in court. “This should never have happened.”

Before the brief but emotional court appearance, the DA met privately with Broadwater in a small room to apologize in person.

“When he spoke to me about the wrong that was done to me, I couldn’t help but cry,” Broadwater said. “The relief that a district attorney of that magnitude would side with me in this case, it’s so profound, I don’t know what to say.”

For 40 years, Broadwater has never stopped fighting to clear his name. That resolve came from meeting his future wife, Elizabeth, within a year after returning home to Syracuse.

“I met a person that believed in me. And she’s been with me since 1999,” Broadwater told Syracuse.com I The Post-Standard. “I told her I’d never stop fighting this case.”

His wife wanted children, he wouldn’t go for it.

“I wouldn’t bring children into this world because of this,” Broadwater said, his voice cracking with emotion. “And now, we’re past (that) age. We can’t have children.”

Broadwater’s insistence that he’s innocent led him to contact many lawyers over the years, with no success, Hammond and Swartz said.

Broadwater once spent $300 on a polygraph test (which he passed) and later tried to hire O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran with a $1,000 check (later returned after Cochran noted he didn’t do appeals to convictions), Hammond and Swartz said. He passed another polygraph this year.

He’s been turned away from countless jobs and educational opportunities over the years for one simple fact: he’s a convicted rapist on the sex offender registry. One time, Broadwater said, he spent several days taking BOCES classes in heating and air conditioning before his past caught up to him and he was ordered to stay away from campus.

“I always hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” Broadwater said.

The rape happened before the advent of modern DNA technology, and evidence from the original rape kit no longer exists.

Hammond said he’s convinced Broadwater didn’t do it, but without the rape kit, no one will ever know for sure.

“I know Tony Broadwater is innocent,” Hammond said. “You read the trial transcript, you read Ms. Sebold’s book and you talk to Tony Broadwater and you know he’s innocent … He’s simply not the man Ms. Sebold described in her book.”

Broadwater said he “truly and strongly” sympathizes with Sebold’s plight.

“Something did happen, but I was not the person,” Broadwater said. “I just hope and pray that, if she had doubts, then she should have come forward and said, ‘Hey, it wasn’t this man.’”

Broadwater said all he’s looking for in life, now that he’s unburdened by the rape conviction, is to look at people a little more confidently, to be able to walk through a park again without feeling uneasy and maybe even take a vacation.

Broadwater’s lawyers said the state of New York bears the responsibility to help Broadwater fulfill his modest dreams.

Swartz said Broadwater deserves financial compensation for his years of suffering. She hopes the state will see the injustice in the same way that the DA did.

“That’s going to be a decision to be made by the state of New York, not us,” Swartz said. “But we’re gonna fight for it.”

A short trial

Broadwater was 20 years old when he was charged with forcible rape in Sebold’s attack in Thornden Park near Syracuse University. The trial before a judge without a jury took only parts of two days, an unusually short case given the seriousness of the rape charge. Similar cases can often take several full days to a week.

Sebold provided crucial evidence against the accused rapist at his 1982 trial, identifying him in court. But Sebold admitted in her book – and confirmed by the trial transcript – that she had picked the wrong guy out of an earlier police lineup.

“The Court will hear that there was a lineup, and in the lineup procedure she identified the wrong individual,” prosecutor William Mastine said during the trial. “But, nevertheless, there was evidence contained in the rape kit consistent with the fact that she had been raped.”

The only forensic evidence described in the trial transcript – microscopic hair analysis – was judged 35 years later to be junk science by the FBI.

Nevertheless, Broadwater was found guilty by then state Supreme Court Justice Water T. Gorman after forgoing his right to a jury trial.

A horrific crime

No one doubts that Sebold was raped during a horrific attack as she walked through the darkened park near Syracuse University on May 8, 1981. Sebold describes the ordeal in vivid detail at the beginning of her memoir.

Afterward, Sebold described walking to safety before reporting the rape. Sebold left school for summer recess.

But she decided to return to SU in the fall: After all the rapist had taken, he wouldn’t deny her that, she explained in the book.

On Oct. 5 – nearly five months after the rape – Sebold was walking on Marshall Street near campus when she spotted Broadwater, her book and the trial transcript agree.

Sebold recalled, in her book and at trial, leaving the scene frightened before reporting the encounter to police. Police picked up Broadwater and charged him with rape.

That led to a police lineup, in which five men were ordered to stand next to each other behind one-way glass for Sebold to try to pick out her attacker from months before.

Before the lineup, Broadwater’s lawyer at the time, Steve Paquette, asked to have one of the other men in the lineup replaced, the trial transcript confirms.

Paquette described the switch as justified because none of the other men looked similar to Broadwater, other than the fact they were all Black.

Sebold ultimately picked the man added to the lineup – not Broadwater.

She testified at trial that she thought that Broadwater and the man added looked like twins.

The fact that Sebold picked the wrong man out of the lineup was enough to raise a reasonable doubt of Broadwater’s guilt, Broadwater’s lawyers now argue.

Yes, Sebold had identified Broadwater in the courtroom during the trial. But Broadwater was sitting at the defense table and was the only Black man in the room. That’s something that his original trial lawyer, Paquette, had noted during the proceeding.

As for the microscopic hair analysis tying Broadwater to the rape, the forensic chemist who testified at trial admitted that there was a “possibility” the rapist’s hair might have belonged to someone else.

All chemist Merrill Stephen Kaszubinski could say was that the rapist’s hair was “consistent” with Broadwater’s hair; Kaszubinski couldn’t say how many other people might have similar hair.

That’s ultimately what doomed that type of hair analysis. In 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey acknowledged “problems” with the way hair analysis was used at trial before the early 1990s.

“In many cases, we have discovered that the examiners made statements that went beyond the limits of science in ways that put more weight on a hair comparison than scientifically appropriate,” Comey wrote in a widely cited letter to state governors. “Hair is not like fingerprints, because there aren’t studies that show how many people have identical looking hair fibers.”

That opened the door for prosecutors across the country – including in Onondaga County – to reexamine cases primarily based on hair analysis. But Broadwater had long since finished his 16-year prison term by then, and his appeals, exhausted in the mid-1980s, hadn’t focused on hair analysis.

Broadwater had asked an appellate court to reverse the conviction based on the mistaken identification during the police lineup. But the appellate court declined to do so in 1984, ruling that Broadwater and the other man “bore a remarkable resemblance.”

Broadwater’s other appeals included one on his own in 1983, another in 1992 while still in prison and a third in 2006, went nowhere. Each of those happened before microscopic hair analysis was officially discredited.

But Sebold’s memoir — which is being turned into a movie — ultimately led to a reexamination of his case, according to his lawyers. “Lucky” is slated to become a movie in 2022, featuring Victoria Pedretti in the role of Sebold.

Tim Mucciante, of Michigan, signed on to help produce the movie but he told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard that he became skeptical of Broadwater’s guilt.

Over the summer, Mucciante, who no longer works on the “Lucky” production, took Broadwater’s case to Hammond, who brought fellow defense lawyer Swartz into the mix.

Sebold had used a pseudonym for her rapist in the book – “Gregory Madison” – so it took some work to discover the identity of the man convicted in her rape. The lawyers also obtained the original trial transcript and talked to Broadwater.

That’s when Hammond and Swartz decided to fight to clear Broadwater’s name. They credited Fitzpatrick for taking a personal interest in the case and understanding the latest in forensic science had debunked the use of hair analysis.

In an interview, Broadwater described how after prison he has had a life of odd jobs and manual labor, his prospects limited by his rape conviction. Eventually, Broadwater said, he earned chances at factories like Syracuse China, and volunteered to work night shifts.

After all, he said, police couldn’t implicate him in another late-night attack if he could show he was at work. “I always wanted a night job, to protect myself,” Broadwater said.

To this day, Broadwater does some trash hauling with a truck he bought. He also repurposes old metal furniture into large meat smokers.

“I’m still struggling. Today, I’m still struggling,” Broadwater said.

Editor’s note: Syracuse.com’s Chris Libonati and Rylee Kirk contributed to this report.

Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.