![]() ![]() ![]() He was denied parole at least five times because he wouldn't admit to a crime he didn't commit, according to his attorneys. He was sentenced to sixteen years in prison, and served the entire term. In 1982, Broadwater was convicted on the flimsy basis of Sebold’s cross-racial flawed identification, and a microscopic hair analysis procedure that in later years the Justice Department abandoned as a junk science technique. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her - and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Nevertheless, the police worked to convince the teenaged Sebold that Broadwater was the right man. Regarding this, Sebold wrote: “the expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me”. Looking at the line-up through one-way glass, Sebold identified the wrong man in the line-up. The police picked him up and placed him in a police line-up for Sebold to identify. Then a police officer suggested the name of Anthony Broadwater, a Black man they had seen in the area. Sebold went to the police, who searched the area without success. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. It had been nearly six months since we’d seen each other last. She wrote that she was too afraid to call out: “That’s the man who raped me!” Instead, she kept walking as she said she heard him laughing. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again…. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ I knew him, but I could not make myself speak. It was a stroll in the park to him he had met an acquaintance on the street. Then, nearly six full months later, Sebold spotted a Black man on Marshall Street near Syracuse University. As Sebold describes it in her memoir, She told police it had been a black man, but the composite sketch drawn from her description was inconclusive. ![]() Sebold suffered from PTSD and addiction troubles for years. The title stems from a police officer telling her she was “lucky” to be alive because someone had raped and then murdered his victim in the same place. Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, recounts her 1981 rape as a 19-year-old student at Syracuse University. Sexual violence against a woman, racist assumptions and wrongful imprisonment against a black man, plus police and prosecutor corruption created a tragedy, and the fact that neither Sebold nor her publisher Scribner seem willing to even apologize is infuriating. This ugly, difficult situation over Alice Sebold’s bestselling 1999 memoir about her rape, and the exoneration last week of the black man wrongly convicted of that rape, is an intersectional nightmare in my view. ![]()
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