Man imprisoned for 16 years after being falsely accused of rape is awarded $5.5m in settlement

‘I hope and pray that others in my situation can achieve the same measure of justice. We all suffer from destroyed lives,’ Anthony Broadwater says

Anthony Broadwater, after his sentence was overturned (AP)

Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in prison and four decades falsely accused of rape before he was exonerated.

He’s now set to receive $5.5m in a settlement with the state of New York, his attorneys said on Monday.

Mr Broadwater was accused in 1981 of raping writer Alice Sebold when she was a student at Syracuse University, a conviction that was overturned in 2021 – 40 years later.

One of his lawyers, David Hammond, said on Monday that the agreement was signed by Mr Broadwater’s attorneys and lawyers for New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“I appreciate what Attorney General James has done, and I hope and pray that others in my situation can achieve the same measure of justice. We all suffer from destroyed lives,” Mr Broadwater said in a statement shared by Mr Hammond.

“Obviously no amount of money can erase the injustices Mr Broadwater suffered, but the settlement now officially acknowledges them,” Ms Sebold said via a spokesperson.

Ms Sebold was raped in a park close to campus as an 18-year-old when she was a freshman at Syracuse.

She wrote about the rape and the following prosecution in her 1999 memoir Lucky.

In 2002, her novel The Lovely Bones was published. It follows the aftermath of a teen girl being raped and murdered. It was subsequently adapted into a film starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci.

Ms Sebold, a white woman, outlined in Lucky how she saw a Black man in the street months after she had been raped, and that she was sure that it had been the man who attacked her.

The man was referred to by the pseudonym Gregory Madison in the book.

“He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street,” she wrote. “‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’”

Mr Broadwater was then arrested by police, but when faced with his appearance in a police lineup, Ms Sebold chose a different man as her attacker. But Mr Broadwater was still tried and convicted in 1982. On the witness stand, Ms Sebold said he had raped her and an expert said that microscopic hair analysis linked him to the crime.

The Department of Justice has since qualified such analysis to be junk science.

Mr Broadwater, who was released from prison in 1999, had to register as a sex offender until November 2021, when his conviction was vacated.

Syracuse is included in Onondaga County. Its district attorney, William Fitzpatrick, joined the motion to vacate. He noted that witness identifications are often unreliable, especially between racial lines.

The settlement has to be approved by a judge before it can go ahead.

“Anthony Broadwater was convicted for a crime he never committed, and was incarcerated despite his innocence. While we cannot undo the wrongs from more than four decades ago, this settlement agreement is a critical step to deliver some semblance of justice to Mr Broadwater,” Ms James told the AP in a statement.

Mr Broadwater has launched a civil rights lawsuit on the federal level against Onondaga County, the city of Syracuse, an assistant district attorney, and a police officer involved in his prosecution.

In 2021, Ms Sebold apologized to Mr Broadwater in a statement shared on Medium.

“As a traumatized 18-year-old rape victim, I chose to put my faith in the American legal system. My goal in 1982 was justice — not to perpetuate injustice. And certainly not to forever, and irreparably, alter a young man’s life by the very crime that had altered mine,” she wrote.