In their rush to convict Anthony Broadwater for raping a college student, Syracuse police, prosecutors and judges cut corners. They ignored obvious red flags. They committed grave mistakes and sent an innocent man to prison.
You know part of the story by now: Broadwater was wrongly convicted of the 1981 rape of Alice Sebold, a Syracuse University student who went on to become a best-selling author. Broadwater was finally exonerated in November, after 16 years in prison and 23 more years on the sex offender registry.
This is the rest of the story: what went wrong and who’s to blame.
Syracuse.com reporters dug through hundreds of pages of police reports, prosecutor memos, grand jury minutes and court records to piece together how Broadwater ended up in prison and why his appeals fell on deaf ears. We tracked down nearly every living person with first-hand knowledge and interviewed those who would talk.
Broadwater was doomed by a series of bad decisions by Syracuse legal authorities. They sought justice for a white college girl who was raped in a city park, and they paid too little heed to the destruction of a poor young Black man’s life.
Sebold, 18, was a Syracuse University freshman from suburban Philadelphia. When she saw 20-year-old Broadwater on the street — five months after her rape — she said she was certain he was the person who raped her.
But a few weeks later, standing several feet away from him behind one-way glass, Sebold couldn’t tell the difference between Broadwater and another Black man. She picked the other guy.
Prosecutors pushed to indict Broadwater anyway. A judge declared him guilty based on the wobbly ID and some unreliable hair evidence. Appellate courts consistently failed to see the wrongs of the case.
In all those decisions, Broadwater’s skin color likely played a role, said Paula Johnson, a Syracuse University law school professor who serves on a commission advising state court officials on issues affecting people of color.
“I believe that race was a central factor in what happened here,” she said. “The assailant was a Black man. But the system cannot allow just any Black man to be held accountable for the crime. It has to be the actual perpetrator.”
Veteran cops and lawyers say they don’t believe authorities knew Broadwater was innocent or targeted him because he was Black. At the same time, many observers suspect that Broadwater’s race blinded authorities to the injustice they were setting in motion.
Langston McKinney, who was Syracuse’s first Black city court judge before retiring in 2011, said Broadwater’s case was one of many injustices perpetrated against African Americans.
“We should be celebrating one Broadwater (exoneration) every day for all the injustices that have been done against Black people,” he said.
‘It took the right people’
The mistakes in Broadwater’s conviction are easy to see in hindsight. The identification of a Black defendant by a white witness would face challenges today, including a standard warning to jurors about how unreliable cross-racial identification is. The hair analysis presented would be laughed out of court.
But even by the standards of 1981, the case against Broadwater was garbage, said local defense attorney Chuck Keller.
“Remember, nothing new has come out” since 1981, Keller said. “It’s the same evidence. It’s just that, you know, it took the right people to present it and the right people to hear it.”
Broadwater never gave up appealing his case. He served 16 years in prison steadfastly maintaining his innocence. In 23 years since his release, he has committed no crimes.
He passed two lie detector tests. He tried to appeal his conviction at least half a dozen times, continuing the fight even after getting out of prison.
None of that was enough.
If not for Sebold’s fame, Broadwater would still be a convicted man. A movie producer working on a film about Sebold’s rape memoir “Lucky” got curious and stirred up an investigation that eventually brought Broadwater’s case back into court. Even Broadwater’s victory came because of someone else’s prestige.
What follows is a step-by-step look at how the system failed.
Skepticism, then suddenly an arrest
At first, Syracuse cops did not believe Sebold, despite clear evidence that she was raped.
At about 2 a.m. May 8, she staggered into SU’s Marion Hall bloodied and bruised and immediately reported her rape to dormitory security. She was rushed by ambulance to Crouse Hospital, where a rape kit showed she had been brutalized. Her broken glasses, knocked off during the attack, were found by police near Thornden Park’s amphitheater, along with a knife that might have been the one used to threaten her.
Sebold gave two detailed statements to city cops that morning. A few hours later, the case was assigned to Investigator George Lorenz, who worked the East Side.
Lorenz took yet another statement from Sebold. Inexplicably, he ended it with this assertion: “It is this writer’s opinion, after interviewing the victim, that this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual.”
He did not state why he doubted her despite the bruises on her face, her broken glasses found at the scene, and the rape kit of fluids, hair and other samples collected at the hospital. An emergency room doctor later testified she was certain Sebold was raped.
Barely half a day after Sebold’s attack, police mothballed her case. It would remain dormant for five months.
That attitude of immediately questioning a rape victim was commonplace in 1981, said Patricia Fletcher, the first director of Syracuse’s Rape Crisis Center, whose staff helped Sebold through the ordeal.
“It was still just a good old boys attitude,” Fletcher said of the era. “Why was she out at night? What was she doing at this place? What was she wearing? It was a whole different culture.”
Five months passed. Sebold called police the evening of Oct. 5, 1981, to say she had just seen the man who raped her talking with a cop on Marshall Street.
Sgt. Paul Rowand hopped in a cruiser with Sebold and trolled Marshall Street to see if they could spot the man. They couldn’t. But Officer Paul Clapper told investigators he had been on Marshall Street talking with Broadwater, who fit the description given by Sebold. That’s all it took.
“Arrest is imminent,” Rowand wrote in his report.
Investigator Lorenz reopened the rape case. A few days later, police finally got around to checking the pocketknife from the rape scene for fingerprints (with no useful results). They did nothing more to look for evidence that Broadwater was involved, at least nothing that was documented in their reports. Instead, after contacting the DA’s office, they got a judge to sign a warrant for Broadwater’s arrest.
They took him into custody Oct. 14.
‘Horrible’ race relations
Syracuse has long been a deeply segregated city. In 1981, 16% of the population was African American, but only 2% of police officers were Black. The city signed a federal consent decree promising to improve minority hiring.
Steve Williams, a Black ex-cop who joined the force in 1981, described police relations with the Black community as “horrible.” Williams said many police officers felt free to abuse their power without repercussions. He said he never knew a cop who would intentionally frame a suspect, but the overall climate was hostile. As a young officer, he was caught in the middle.
“The community … automatically doesn’t like you because you’re a cop. And then the guys you’re working with don’t like you because you’re Black,” he said.
Williams spent 27 years as a Syracuse officer. Much of what he saw he is trying to forget, he said.
For example: “In those days, we were making an arrest and a guy pulled a camera out, and they (police) beat the crap out of this guy and broke his camera. And he knew better, not to say a word. That’s just the way it was. There was nobody going to internal affairs. … The people knew you’d better not complain, because you would have hell to pay,” Williams said.
Most officers who worked the South Side knew of the Broadwaters, Williams said. Some of the six boys in the family had been in trouble.
Raised by a widowed father who worked as a janitor, Anthony Broadwater had a couple of run-ins with police as a youth, records show. When he was 12, he was accused of attempted robbery with two other boys and was later sent to a facility in Albany for treatment, according to information presented at his rape trial. At 18, Broadwater and two other Henninger High School students were charged with petit larceny for stealing $24 from a school locker.
Broadwater left high school without graduating and joined the Marines. He received a general discharge after about 18 months and returned to Syracuse, where he took care of his ailing father.
After his arrest for Sebold’s rape, Broadwater was confident his case would be dismissed. He volunteered to appear in a lineup. He volunteered to provide blood or hair samples, and to take a lie detector test. The more evidence cops had, he thought, the more obvious it would be they had the wrong man.
“My brothers said they’re going to railroad me,” he recalled in an interview. “I said, they can’t. There’s nothing to railroad me with.”
His brothers were right.
‘Identical twins’
One month after seeing him on Marshall Street, on Nov. 4, Sebold was brought in for a lineup set up by prosecutors.
Broadwater, who was out on bail, arrived with his attorney. Four other Black men were brought over from the jail. Before Sebold arrived, Broadwater’s lawyer asked for a quick change to make sure at least one of the men looked similar to Broadwater.
Lawyer Steven Paquette requested that one of the men be replaced by Henry Hudson, an 18-year-old inmate whom Broadwater had met in jail. A prosecutor had no objection but noted that Hudson had facial hair, while Broadwater did not.
Yet, Sebold picked Hudson, who was standing next to Broadwater, as her attacker. She later testified she thought they looked like “identical twins.”
Psychology researchers have pointed out for decades that eyewitness identifications are often unreliable. Most people don’t remember faces as well as they think they do. In the case of cross-racial identification — for example, a white woman identifying a Black man — the problem is multiplied.
The “other-race effect” was first written about in 1914 in the Journal of Criminal Law and Police Science. Multiple scientific studies have confirmed the phenomenon.
The problem is unfamiliarity, not prejudice. Regardless of a person’s attitude toward other races, they are more likely to see similarities among individuals of a different race, studies have shown.
It took a long time for the research to make it into courtrooms. In 2017, New York state began to require this warning to juries for any case that hinged on cross-racial identification:
“You should consider that some people have greater difficulty in accurately identifying members of a different race than in accurately identifying members of their own race …”
Mistaken eyewitness identifications contributed to 69% of more than 375 wrongful convictions in the United States overturned by DNA evidence since 1992, according to the Innocence Project.
Bad cross-racial identifications are especially prevalent in sexual assault cases, according to a 2012 study by the National Registry of Exonerations. Mistaken eyewitness identifications occurred in 80% of the 305 sexual assault exonerations recorded by the registry between 1989 and 2012. Black defendants accounted for more than two-thirds of those exonerated, the study said.
Hudson, who still lives in Syracuse, told Syracuse.com he remembers the lineup. Hudson did not know at the time who or what it was for.
Does he look like Broadwater?
Hudson laughed.
“I don’t look like him,” he said.
Deflecting questions
The lineup problem should have ended the case against Broadwater unless the cops could find more evidence, said Johnson and William Fitzpatrick, the current district attorney.
“Somebody in the prosecutor’s office should have stopped it at that point,” Johnson said. “That was wrong.”
But a young assistant district attorney on the case, Gail Uebelhoer, did not let a bad lineup get in the way.
Just three years out of SU Law School, Uebelhoer (pronounced EE-bull-hair) was assigned to a new unit in the DA’s office that focused on sexual abuse and child abuse cases. The district attorney at the time, Richard Hennessy Jr., created the sex crimes unit the year Sebold was raped.
It had its problems. Hennessy would disband the new unit less than two years later. By 1983, prosecutors had lost nine rape cases in a row, according to newspaper stories.
Uebelhoer complained in a 1983 interview that juries were too reluctant to issue guilty verdicts in rape cases. Jurors wanted to see “perfect victims,” she said.
“It’s not enough for a woman to say she was raped and that’s the guy who did it,” she told the Herald American in March 1983. “They want to see torn blouses, cuts, bruises.”
Sebold was an exception. She had cuts and bruises, her glasses were broken. Her weakness: She had trouble identifying her rapist.
Prosecutors pressed on. They scrambled to present the case — bad lineup and all — to a grand jury.
Three hours after the lineup, Uebelhoer put Sebold under oath and pushed for Broadwater’s indictment.
The grand jury transcript, unsealed by a judge this month and reviewed by Syracuse.com, shows how hard Uebelhoer worked to squelch the skepticism of one grand juror. When the juror asked about the lineup that went wrong, Uebelhoer cut them off.
More than almost anyone else who touched the case, the grand juror had a sense of the disaster that was in plain view. Clapper, the cop who had been chatting with Broadwater on Marshall Street, was on the stand.
The juror, in imperfect grammar, asked: “When someone is picked out of a lineup, doesn’t it have to be absolutely sure that the person that they picked out of the lineup is the one they seen before? In other words, (they) pick someone out of a lineup. Don’t the one that pick them out have to be absolutely sure that this is the person?”
Clapper responded: “That’s correct.”
Uebelhoer quickly stepped in.
“OK. Wait a minute,” she told the juror. “He really can’t give you an opinion on that.”
The grand juror persisted.
“No, I’m just asking,” the juror said. “… In other words, if someone is picked out of a lineup, before they can go and arrest, the person picking him out has to be absolutely sure that this is the person that they said did the crime that they are picking out of the lineup.”
Uebelhoer: “But lineups are conducted at different times and investigations, and he can’t. He (Clapper) was not a part of the lineup in this investigation.”
Juror: “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m just asking, quote unquote, to go out and ask someone (to) pick out of a lineup, they have to be sure that the person they’re picking out of the lineup is the one that did the crime. I’m not saying for this instance. I’m talking about at any time.”
Uebelhoer: “Let’s keep our questions directed to this person-particular incident.”
That was the end of Clapper’s testimony. “All right, officer, thank you,” Uebelhoer said.
The grand jury indicted Broadwater for rape, sodomy, robbery and five other counts.
“There’s no way that can be justified,” Johnson said. “There’s just no way.”
Tainted testimony
Before the grand jury convened, Uebelhoer spoke with Sebold about the lineup, according to the author’s account in “Lucky. If the book is accurate — and Fitzpatrick said Sebold told him by email that it was true to her memory of events — Uebelhoer’s conduct was “problematic” at best, Fitzpatrick said.
Broadwater’s attorneys use stronger language. They call it prosecutorial misconduct, an ethical breach that could potentially bring sanctions.
According to the book, Uebelhoer coached Sebold after the lineup in a way that seemed designed to bolster her confidence that Broadwater was the right guy. Uebelhoer told her that Broadwater and Hudson had conspired to trick her into choosing the wrong person, Sebold wrote.
“Of course you chose the wrong one,” Uebelhoer is quoted as saying. “He and his attorney worked to make sure you’d never have a chance.”
Uebelhoer went on to tell Sebold that Broadwater and Hudson were friends who used each other “in every lineup they do” to confuse victims, according to the book. “They’re dead ringers.”
In fact, Broadwater had never been in a lineup before, Fitzpatrick told Syracuse.com. During a recent interview, Hudson said he did not know Broadwater before meeting him at the jail.
Uebelhoer helped Sebold with the research for “Lucky,” according to the book. Uebelhoer did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
Fitzpatrick said the post-lineup conversation would have been clearly improper. Sebold’s trouble with identification should have been a warning that evidence was lacking, not a nuisance to be explained away.
“It would certainly, in my judgment, taint any subsequent identification by this woman,” Fitzpatrick said.
For example: the identification Sebold made six months later at Broadwater’s trial.
“Is there any doubt in your mind, Miss Sebold, that the person that you saw on Marshall Street is the same person who attacked you on May 8th in Thornden Park?” the trial prosecutor, William Mastine Jr., asked, according to the transcript.
“No doubt whatsoever,” Sebold testified.
‘This girl … a virgin’
Sebold’s identifications of Broadwater, on Marshall Street and again during the trial, were the key to the guilty verdict, Mastine said in response to questions from Syracuse.com.
Mastine took over the case during the trial in May 1982 before State Supreme Court Justice Walter Gorman. Uebelhoer accompanied Mastine in court but did not present the evidence.
Mastine, now 74, said he does not remember any general concerns about the accuracy of cross-racial identifications when the case was tried in 1982. Asked whether prosecutors should have scuttled the case after the lineup confusion, he replied tersely: “Hindsight 20/20?”
At several points during the trial Mastine emphasized that Sebold was a virgin. Broadwater’s lawyers would later describe that in legal papers as an attempt to play up racial aspects of the case — “the white female victim’s virginity, lost to her Black rapist.”
Mastine argued at the trial that Sebold was more likely to remember her rapist’s appearance accurately because she was a virgin.
“This girl, (a) freshman, (at) Syracuse University, was in fact a virgin,” Mastine said in his closing summary. The details of the attack would stand out in her mind, Mastine said, “maybe even more so than a person who has had some previous sexual experience.”
Two months later, at the sentencing, the prosecutor again raised the point, this time as a reason for Broadwater to receive the maximum prison term.
Sebold “was a virgin, and I think the sentencing ought to go along with the seriousness of the crime committed against this young lady,” Mastine said.
Gorman sentenced Broadwater to the maximum: 8 1/3 to 25 years.
Mastine’s tactics amounted to a “dog whistle” to play up issues of race and morality, according to David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, the lawyers who petitioned for Broadwater’s exoneration.
Mastine disputed their interpretation.
“I am not sure what a ‘dog whistle’ tactic is, and the claim of my appealing to some dynamic of race and morality, whatever that may be, is moronic at best!” he wrote.
Mastine no longer practices law. After entering private practice, Mastine pleaded guilty in 1996 to a felony, second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument, in connection with charges that he stole $16,500 from a client. He was sentenced to probation.
After the sex crimes unit was disbanded in 1983, Uebelhoer was assigned to a position handling cases in city court, according to news reports. She left the DA’s office in 1984 to work as a law clerk for a state Supreme Court justice in Oneida County.
In 1995, then-Gov. George Pataki appointed Uebelhoer as an Oneida County Court judge to fill a vacancy. She served as a judge until 1996 before returning to work as a law clerk. She retired from the court job in 2010, according to state pension records.
When the state Senate voted unanimously to affirm her judgeship, the transcript shows that several Central New York senators publicly praised her grasp of the law, her integrity and her compassion.
A defense lawyer’s gamble
Paquette, Broadwater’s lawyer, was thinking about his client’s skin color when he took perhaps the biggest gamble in the case: waiving a jury trial and putting Broadwater’s fate in the hands of a judge.
In a recent interview, Paquette said he was worried that an all-white jury — as many were in 1981 — might convict Broadwater despite the lack of evidence.
Gorman, the judge assigned to the case, stood out from some of his peers at the time as being fair-minded, veteran attorneys say. If there were a judge to trust, it was Gorman, local lawyers agree.
Gorman was unique in other ways: He lived out of town, in Binghamton, and he had been appointed to the bench by the state legislature, so he did not have to get elected.
“Throughout trial, I believed that Judge Gorman would be sensitive to Alice and her situation, but that he’d have to conclude that her case was legally insufficient,” Paquette said. “As much as his heart would go out to her, I thought he would do the right thing.”
In “Lucky,” Sebold relates an incident that casts doubt on Gorman’s judgment.
During a short break in the trial — after Sebold was questioned by the prosecutor and before the defense attorney began cross-examination — Sebold was led into a conference room and given a cup of coffee by the bailiff. Then, according to the book, Gorman entered the room and chatted with Sebold for a few minutes.
Gorman asked her about her family — what her father did, whether she had brothers and sisters. They did not discuss the trial. But the visit would be nevertheless highly improper, experts say — as improper as it would have been for Gorman to sit down for a friendly chat with the defendant.
Sebold’s account could not be independently verified. Linda Campbell, Gorman’s longtime law clerk, said she has no memory of the trial. Sebold did not respond to requests for an interview sent via her publicity agency and by registered letter to her home.
Gorman, who died in 2009, had a large family, including four daughters, one of whom later became a Maine Supreme Court justice, Campbell said.
There was little evidence presented at trial.
Besides having Sebold point out Broadwater in court, the only attempt by prosecutors to link him to the crime was by comparing one of his pubic hairs to a hair recovered from Sebold’s body.
At the time, courts relied too heavily on microscopic hair analysis to identify criminals, the FBI conceded in 2015. But even in 1981, authorities knew that visual hair comparisons were more useful to rule out someone than to isolate one person.
At Broadwater’s trial, a Syracuse police forensic chemist testified that the hair found on Sebold was “consistent as having come from Anthony Broadwater,” according to the transcript. He said the hair also could have come from someone else.
Gorman seemed to rely on the hair comparison, Fitzpatrick said.
The trial lasted only about eight hours over two days.
The verdict came quickly, Paquette said: Before prosecutor Mastine had returned to his seat after making final comments, the judge declared Broadwater guilty.
Another rape in Thornden Park
While Broadwater was in jail here before starting his state prison sentence, something curious happened. There was another rape in Thornden Park.
A 19-year-old white woman was attacked at 11 p.m. while jogging, according to police reports. Based on a description provided by the victim and aggressive detective work by police, the cops identified a strong suspect: a thin, muscular 20-year-old Black man with close-cropped hair.
He admitted being in the park that night and to other details related by the victim. He was on the verge of taking a voluntary lie detector test when he abruptly left the police station. The case stalled. The man was never charged. And police made no effort to look at possible links to the Sebold attack, Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick said the case seemed similar enough to consider a connection.
“Based on the description that that victim gave in that case, and its proximity both in place and time to Alice’s rape, I thought that was worth pursuing,” he said.
Like 1950s Mississippi
James Dungan, a young Hiscock Legal Aid lawyer, was assigned to handle Broadwater’s appeal. He still regrets that he couldn’t do more.
Dungan, who went on to a career as a defense lawyer in rural Virginia, vividly recalled to Syracuse.com details of his 1984 defense of Broadwater’s innocence. His arguments emphasized the unreliability of cross-racial identification.
“[C]onsiderable evidence indicates that people are poor at identifying members of another race than of their own,” Dungan wrote, quoting from an influential 1978 Stanford Law Review article, “Did Your Eyes Deceive You?”
Two assistant district attorneys, John Cirando and Michael Marmor, responded to the appeal. They argued, implausibly, that Gorman’s verdict was “supported by overwhelming evidence.”
The appellate judges sided with the prosecutors. They spent 167 words denying Broadwater’s appeal. Rather than fret over the weakness of cross-racial identifications, they found it understandable that Sebold picked the wrong Black man out of the lineup.
Hudson “bore a remarkable resemblance to defendant,” the judges ruled.
Fitzpatrick, the current DA, pointed out that the people in a lineup should look similar. After all, the goal is to test the witness’s ability to point out exactly the right man, not just someone who looks like him.
“It sounds like a 1950s appellate review of a case out of Mississippi,” he said in a recent interview. “The misidentification was understandable because the two Black guys looked alike? What the f***?”
None of the five judges who signed the unanimous decision is still alive. They included several judicial heavyweights, including the court’s longest presiding judge, Michael F. Dillon, and M. Dolores Denman, so revered that the appellate courthouse now bears her name.
‘Did I step up?’
Broadwater tried formal appeals two more times — once on his own in 1983 and in again 1992, with the help of longtime SU law professor James K. Weeks. Judges tossed the appeals, saying there wasn’t anything new to decide.
Broadwater was left with few options.
He sent $1,000 to Johnnie Cochran in 1998, three years after Cochran’s win in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. Cochran returned the check. He didn’t do appeals.
Broadwater contacted the Innocence Project in 1999 — hoping that advances in DNA might exonerate him. His case was assigned to a law student and went nowhere. Little did he know that the rape kit and other physical evidence of Sebold’s attack had been destroyed in 1988, with the consent of the DA’s office.
Out of prison in 1999, Broadwater paid $1,400 for Syracuse lawyer Andre Sobolevsky to help him appeal, according to Broadwater’s sworn statement. Sobolevsky disappeared with the money and Broadwater’s personal case file.
A decade later, Sobolevsky made legal headlines after being suspended from practicing law by federal and state courts for work of “shockingly poor quality” — for example, filing documents with the wrong client’s name — that he blamed on an assistant, among other excuses.
In 2002, Broadwater paid to take a polygraph, which he passed, according to court papers. (He passed another in 2021.)
In 2006, defense attorney Chuck Keller agreed to look into Broadwater’s conviction, after helping him deal with traffic violations. But Keller was unable to retrieve Broadwater’s file from Sobolevsky. Keller said he wrote repeatedly to get the paperwork, but Sobolevsky never responded. That was the end of Keller’s involvement.
Sobolevsky died in 2020.
After his discussions with Broadwater, Keller read “Lucky.” He can’t remember why, but he knew it was an account of Broadwater’s case, even though Broadwater appears in the book under the pseudonym Gregory Madison.
After reading the book, Keller concluded that Broadwater’s conviction was wrong. Looking back, he wishes he had found a way to press for Broadwater’s exoneration.
“I meet this guy, I talk to him, I find out about it. And, you know, to my discredit, did I do anything? Did I step up and do it? No. I gotta tell you, I feel guilty about it,” he said.
Finally, a breakthrough
Broadwater was 21 when he was sent to state prison, 38 when he got out. He spent 16 ½ years in some of the state’s most notorious prisons. Among other horrors, he saw a friend get murdered.
After prison, Broadwater bore the mark of a convicted sex offender. He had few friends and worked menial jobs, mostly on the night shift. Even a BOCES training program rejected him because of his record. He seemed destined to spend the rest of his life as a wrongfully convicted Black man.
As it turned out, his fate still hinged on Sebold’s status as the famous white rape victim.
Sebold drew upon her trauma in her blockbuster writing career: first with her memoir “Lucky” about the Thornden Park assault and later in “The Lovely Bones” about a fictional, murdered rape victim.
In 2021, a movie producer from Michigan, hired to make a film of “Lucky,” instead launched an investigation to question whether Sebold had identified the true rapist. Two Syracuse lawyers, Hammond and Swartz, got involved, realizing that Broadwater had been railroaded.
After reviewing the case, Fitzpatrick, the DA, cut bureaucratic tape and used his power to bring the case before a judge quickly. Fitzpatrick argued that Broadwater should be fully exonerated.
The judge who heard that plea, Gordon Cuffy, is the only Black criminal court judge ever to hold countywide office. He was appointed to fill the same seat that Gorman, who is white, held decades ago.
Cuffy isn’t talking, but imagine what was on his mind as he read of this debacle. He is the same age as Broadwater. And he was a fellow student with Sebold at Syracuse University.
Cuffy came to SU in 1979 from a poor family in Brooklyn. He graduated in 1984, the same year as Sebold. After going back to Brooklyn for law school, Cuffy returned to live in Syracuse. In 1990, he landed a job as an assistant district attorney.
Cuffy acquired a personal perspective on race and Syracuse police work. In the early 1990s, he lived on East Fayette Street and drove a Mercedes Benz, a gift from his father. That sometimes got him pulled over for no reason. “I was stopped by the police several times,” he said.
Three days before Thanksgiving, Cuffy officially overturned the rape conviction. Broadwater collapsed, sobbing, into his lawyers’ arms.
‘My words mattered’
How many other Anthony Broadwaters are wrongfully incarcerated? It’s hard to estimate, but “these wrongful convictions keep happening,” said Johnson, the SU law professor.
These outrages in the criminal justice system, she said, highlight biases that can distort fundamental American principles: “Whose life has value? Whose life does not have value? Who has credibility and who doesn’t? Who is prone to criminality, who is prone to victimization?”
After Broadwater’s exoneration, Alice Sebold lamented that he was “brutalized” by the system.
Even four years earlier, in a 2017 essay published as an afterword to “Lucky,” Sebold herself pointed out the racial inequities that cursed Broadwater.
At the time she wrote, Sebold still believed that Broadwater rightly had been found guilty. Her point in 2017 was that rape victims from less privileged backgrounds than hers would face more daunting challenges to obtain justice.
Sebold’s words ring just as true — perhaps more so — now that it’s clear Broadwater was wrongly convicted.
“My rapist was poor, black, and uneducated, and came from a family with an entrenched criminal record,” she wrote. “I was a middle-class white girl attending an expensive university. … I knew that my words mattered.”
Staff reporter Johnathan Croyle contributed to this report.
To contact reporter Douglass Dowty: ddowty@syracuse.com | 315-470-6070
To contact reporter Tim Knauss: tknauss@syracuse.com | 315-470-3023
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