Posted on 11/25/2021 1:12:33 PM PST by BenLurkin
A rape conviction at the center of a memoir by award-winning author Alice Sebold has been overturned because of what authorities determined were serious flaws with the 1982 prosecution and concerns the wrong man had been sent to jail.
Anthony Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison, was cleared Monday by a judge of raping Sebold when she was a student at Syracuse University, an assault she wrote about in her 1999 memoir, “Lucky.”
Sebold, 58, wrote in “Lucky” of being raped as a first-year student at Syracuse in May 1981 and then spotting a Black man in the street months later that she was sure was her attacker.
Sebold went to police, but she didn’t know the man’s name and an initial sweep of the area failed to locate him. 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.
Sebold wrote in “Lucky” that when she was informed that she’d picked someone other than the man she’d previously identified as her rapist, she said the two men looked “almost identical.”
She wrote that she realized the defense would be that: “A panicked white girl saw a black man on the street. He spoke familiarly to her and in her mind she connected this to her rape. She was accusing the wrong man.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
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No words.
Being convicted of falsely accusing someone of rape should hold the same sentence as someone convicted of rape.
The original “karen”
(probably supports blm now)
I’m not a racist person. I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating. And I believe there needs to be change, I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct, not just in my case, but in other cases. And it’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of somebody. If they did this to me, imagine what they could have done to a person of color who doesn’t maybe have the resources I do or is not widely publicized like my case.
Well-said.
I was the victim of a crime.
Police brought me several mug shots.
In my heart, I could not attest that any of them was the perpetrator.
I would rather a guilty man go free than put an innocent man in jail.
If I had wrongly identified someone who then lost 16 years of their life to prison, I would be devastated for the rest of my days.
That had DNA testing 16 years ago. I know this because we had it 24 years ago when I was on a jury for a first degree murder trial.
“Sounds like the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “Revenge”
That was exactly what I was thinking. That episode left an impression on me when I saw it back when it originally aired in the early 60s. “That’s him! There he is! That’s him!” “Are you sure?!” “Yes! Yes!” Great shocking ending!
Two injustices here. One, the wrong guy was convicted. Two, the guilty rapist, will never face justice.
Are you talking about 2 different things? In one instance, someone says they were raped when they were never raped. But is that what happened here? Sounds like she was raped but she didn’t pick the correct person as the perpetrator.
I’m so confused. If the case was tried in 1982 how did he spend 16 years in prison? Is this a story from 1998? Was he paroled in 1998 and what’s happening now is that they’re expunging the conviction?
Not every criminal leads DNA behind.
He’s been out of prison for over 20 years but now they’re saying that he was never guilty.
Here's what you're missing:
They had started to do a film about Sebold's memoir Lucky within the last year, and one of the producers realized that the story was horsehockey.
He quit the film and hired a private investigator. This was how "the authorities" discovered the problem.
https://consequence.net/2021/11/producer-rape-memoir-clears-mans-name/
Looks like it was the prosecutors in this case, again.
They're like the Energizer Bunnies of Badness.
You DON'T want to come up on their radar, apparently.
To top it off, Broadwater was a Marine who just got out of the service...
Yes, most normal people would be devastated.
We'll see how Sebold handles this.
In her defense, the prosecutors (surprise, SURPRISE!) appear to have put their thumb on the scales of justice [story in post #16].
Sounds like the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “Revenge”
—
That was a great episode. So very Hitchcock in a twist ending.
I’m scheduled to testify as a witness in a few weeks. It was a car accident I witnessed and provided some first aid for. Turned out to include several drug charges.
I hope they don’t ask me if the accused was the person who caused the crash. I barely remember what she looked like.
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