Man cleared of 1981 rape of Alice Sebold over concerns wrong person sent to jail

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 on 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.

Broadwater shook with emotion, sobbing as his head fell into his hands, as the judge in Syracuse vacated his conviction at the request of prosecutors.

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.

Broadwater was nonetheless tried and convicted in 1982 based largely on two pieces of evidence. On the witness stand, Sebold identified him as her rapist. And an expert said microscopic hair analysis had tied Broadwater to the crime. That type of analysis is now considered junk science by the US Department of Justice.

Messages to Sebold seeking comment were sent through her publisher and her literary agency.

The district attorney apologized to Broadwater privately before the court hearing.

Broadwater, who has worked as a trash hauler and a handyman in the years since his release from prison, told the Associated Press that the rape conviction blighted his job prospects and his relationships with friends and family members.

Even after he married a woman who believed in his innocence, Broadwater never wanted to have children.

Broadwater said he was still crying tears of joy and relief over his exoneration the next day.

In addition to Lucky, Sebold is the author of the novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon.

The Lovely Bones, about the rape and murder of a teenage girl, won the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003 and was made into a movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci.

Mucciante said that after dropping out of the project he hired a private investigator, who put him in touch with Hammond and Melissa Swartz of the Syracuse-based firm CDH Law.