Behind the ‘Lucky’ exoneration: 2 lives filled with pain and a man’s 40-year fight for justice - syracuse.com

Asked to identify her attacker, Sebold looked across the courtroom and picked Anthony Broadwater.

In “Lucky,” Sebold writes about deliberately avoiding describing Broadwater as Black as she pointed him out?

“I’m the only Black man in the courtroom,” Broadwater recalled to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, adding later, “I didn’t realize that no matter what I did, I was probably going to be convicted.”.

Broadwater said he volunteered for every test that police wanted to perform, including hair and fingerprints.

“I’ll give them whatever evidence they want,” Broadwater recalled thinking.

After Broadwater had been in prison for nearly a decade, the rape kit was destroyed.

Following his prison release, Broadwater saved what money he could to try to prove his innocence.

One of his current lawyers, Hammond, said that Broadwater has volunteered for every test ever asked of him.

Before knowing that the rape kit had been destroyed, Broadwater volunteered this year to give DNA samples, said his other lawyer, Swartz.

Hammond said he’s convinced Broadwater didn’t do it, but without the rape kit, it can’t be proven conclusively.

Broadwater stands by what he has said for 40 years: He did not rape Sebold.

Alice Sebold, pictured in 2002, wrote the 1999 memoir "Lucky" about being raped as a Syracuse University student in 1981 and fighting for her attacker's conviction.

Sebold’s searing memoir of her rape did not mention Broadwater by name.

That man was Anthony Broadwater.

He had just been discharged from the Marines to care for his cancer-stricken father, Broadwater later testified in court.

Sebold wrote in “Lucky” that she was convinced that Broadwater was her rapist.

“He was smiling as he approached,” Sebold wrote.

Sebold wrote that Broadwater called out to her.

“I did not respond,” Sebold wrote.

“He had no fear,” Sebold wrote.

After Broadwater’s arrest, Sebold took part in a lineup in which Broadwater and four other men were shown to Sebold through one-way glass.

Paquette described the switch as justified because none of the other men looked similar to Broadwater, other than they were Black.

Sebold ultimately picked the man added to the lineup – not Broadwater.

In asking for Broadwater’s exoneration, Fitzpatrick wrote in court papers last week that he didn’t see any particular resemblance between Broadwater and the man Sebold picked.

This is a photo of a lineup out of which Alice Sebold mistakenly picked the wrong man in November 1981, nearly six months after her rape.

The suspect, Anthony Broadwater, was standing second from right.

There were gates upon walls upon tunnels keeping inmates from the outside world, Broadwater recalled.

I’m going to be home one day,” Broadwater said he told his father during the one visit he made to Attica.

But his father died while Broadwater was in prison.

And his friends fell one-by-one: one was murdered in prison, another later committed suicide in jail and a third was killed while on his own, Broadwater said.

Less than a year after leaving prison, Broadwater went on a date with a woman, Elizabeth.

At the end of the night, Broadwater recalled, he needed to level with her.

“The next day, she came out crying and said, ‘I believe you,’” Broadwater recalled.

Anthony Broadwater, 61, gives a small smile in the court hallway after Judge Gordon Cuffy overturned the 40-year-old rape conviction that wrongfully put him in state prison for Alice Sebold’s rape