David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, got involved in the case is thanks to Tim Mucciante, who was involved in a project to develop a film adaptation of “Lucky.” Part of the reason Broadwater’s attorneys, J. “I just wanted a better quality of life, but I could never get a better quality of jobs.” “She believed me and she gave me more strength,” he said. After their first date, he gave her the transcripts and other documents from his case, telling her to read them and decide if she wanted to be with him. The couple met in 1999, about a year after he was released from prison, he told CNN. And now, we’re past days, we can’t have children,” Broadwater told reporters after the court hearing. His wife wanted children, but “I wouldn’t bring children in the world because of this. “I did what I could do, and that was just you know – creating work for myself doing landscaping, tree removal, hauling, clean-outs,” he said. He struggled to find work after getting out of jail when employers found out about his criminal record. He described how the conviction had ruined his life. “It made me cry with joy and happiness because a man of this magnitude would say what he said on my behalf … it’s, it’s beyond whatever I can say myself.”Īfter his release, Broadwater remained on a sex offender list. “When the district attorney spoke to me, his words were so profound – so strong – it shook me,” Broadwater told CNN on Wednesday. This should never have happened.”īroadwater broke down in tears when the judge announced his decision. “I won’t sully these proceedings by saying I’m sorry,” District Attorney William Fitzpatrick said in the courtroom.
The unreliability of the hair analysis and the conversation between the prosecutor and Sebold after the lineup would probably have led to a different verdict if it had been presented at trial, the attorneys said. In “Lucky,” Sebold wrote that “a detective and a prosecutor told her after the lineup that she picked out the wrong man and how the prosecutor deliberately coached her into rehabilitating her misidentification,” according to the affirmation.ĬNN has reached out to Sebold and her publishing company multiple times for comment. “We know now that the testimony of the forensic chemist stemmed from a largely debunked forensic approach to hair microscopy,” the affirmation stated. “Research has found that the risk of eyewitness misidentification is significantly increased when the witness and the subject are of different races,” the affirmation stated.Īs to the hair analysis, in 2015, “the FBI testified that microscopic hair analysis contained errors in at least 90 percent of the cases the agency reviewed,” according to the attorneys’ news release. He visited his mother's grave for the first time after spending 43 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit
Kevin Strickland (right) was just exonerated for a triple murder he says he didn't commit in Missouri after spending 43 years behind bars. But later, she failed to identify Broadwater in a police lineup.īroadwater was convicted on two pieces of evidence – Sebold’s account – a cross-racial identification, since the author is White and Broadwater is Black – and the analysis of a piece of hair that was later determined to be faulty, his attorneys wrote. He reminded her of the rapist, and she reported the encounter to police, according to Broadwater’s attorneys’ affirmation. It was published in 1999, the year after Broadwater’s release from prison.Īlmost five months after she was raped, Sebold saw Broadwater on the street in Syracuse. Sebold described the rape, which happened when she was a freshman at Syracuse University in 1981, in painstaking detail in her memoir. The Onondaga County District Attorney joined in the motion to vacate the conviction. But it didn’t happen – until Monday, when New York State Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy vacated the rape conviction and other counts related to it. And even after he was released, he didn’t give up. And he passed two lie detector tests.īroadwater, 61, tried five times to get the conviction overturned. He was denied parole at least five times because he wouldn’t admit to a crime he didn’t commit, according to his attorneys. For decades, throughout his years in prison and even after he was released, Anthony Broadwater insisted he was innocent of the rape of “The Lovely Bones” author Alice Sebold, a crime she described in her memoir, “Lucky.”Ĭonvicted in 1982, Broadwater spent more than 16 years in prison.
0 kommentar(er)
