Each of those happened before microscopic hair analysis was discredited, and each went nowhere.Īccording to the New York Times, the publisher for “Lucky,” Scribner, has no plans to update the text of the memoir to reflect the exoneration.Ī planned film adaptation of “Lucky” shed light on the doubt surrounding the prosecution’s case, according to the New York Times, after the project’s executive producer Timothy Mucciante noticed discrepancies between the script and the representation of the story in Sebold’s memoir.
A 2015 investigation with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project revealed that 26 out of 28 examiners with the FBI’s microscopic hair comparison unit overstated the match in a way that benefited prosecutors.īroadwater’s other appeals included one in 1983, another in 1992 and a third in 2006, reported. However, hair analysis is largely regarded to be a flawed and inaccurate forensic tool. The conviction was ultimately based on the evidence from Sebold’s recognition of Broadwater and analysis of hair found at the scene, the New York Times reported. She reported Broadwater to the police after recognizing him as her attacker, CNN reported that his attorney said, but she later failed to identify him in a police lineup.īroadwater asked an appellate court to reverse the conviction based on the lineup, but the court declined in 1984 because Broadwater and the man that Sebold picked “bore a remarkable resemblance,” reported. Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick sided with defense lawyers in the argument that the initial prosecution was flawed, reported.īroadwater was charged with the crime when the then-18-year-old Sebold saw him in the street in Syracuse months after the attack. Since his release in 1998, he had remained on New York state’s public sex offender registry. 22, after more than 16 years in prison, Broadwater was exonerated by New York State Supreme Court Justice Roman Cuffy, who vacated the rape conviction and related counts, CNN reported.īroadwater spent 16 years in prison for the crime after his 1982 conviction, according to CNN, and was denied parole at least five times. But Anthony Broadwater, the man convicted of her 1981 rape in Thornden Park near SU, maintained his innocence. Sebold would later become known for her novel “The Lovely Bones,” a fictional story which also centers around rape.
In it, she described in detail being raped as a freshman at Syracuse University. Subscribe to our newsletter here.Įditor’s Note: This story contains mentions of rape.Īlice Sebold published her memoir “Lucky” in 1999.
Victoria Pedretti, who was set to star as Sebold, is no longer involved with the project.Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox. Update November 27, 7:00 p.m.: The film adaptation of Lucky has lost its financing, per Variety. Sebold has not yet responded to a request for comment from the AP. The case was reopened when a film adaptation of Sebold’s memoir went into pre-production and executive producer Tim Mucciante “became skeptical of Broadwater’s guilt when the first draft of the script came out because it differed so much from the book.” Mucciante hired a private investigator and a defense lawyer who found flaws in the case, including faulty forensic analysis and Sebold initially identifying the wrong man in a police lineup because they looked - to quote Lucky - “almost identical.” At Broadwater’s exoneration, District Attorney William Fitzpatrick said, “I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ That doesn’t cut it … This should never have happened.”Įven after he was released from prison in 1999, Broadwater lived with the stigma of rape conviction and imprisonment, saying that his place on New York’s sex-offender registry held him back from job prospects and relationships with friends and family. Sebold’s assault became the subject matter of her debut book, the 1999 memoir Lucky. On the witness stand in court, she wrongly identified him as her rapist, and Broadwater was sent to prison for 16 years. Months later, she spotted Anthony Broadwater, a Black man unrelated to the assault, and brought him to the police’s attention. On Monday, November 22, four decades after The Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold accused a now 61-year-old Anthony Broadwater of rape, his conviction was rightfully overturned in court due to what the Associated Press reports as “serious flaws with the 1982 prosecution and concerns the wrong man had been sent to jail.” The author says she was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University in a tunnel near campus.
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