Whipped Cream Difficulties

I feel like I have to write about this story, since I don’t think it has received much attention, and it sits at the odd intersection of crime and publishing. I’m trying to step lightly here, because what happened to both of the people involved is horrible, and I hope they are able to find some measure of peace.

Anthony J. Broadwater was exonerated on Monday. He was convicted of rape and spent 16 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out:

…a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.

What makes this story slightly more significant than many of these cases is: the victim was Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a non-fiction book about the attack.

Ms. Sebold used a fictitious name for Mr. Broadwater in her memoir, identifying him as Gregory Madison.

Ms. Sebold identified Mr. Broadwater as her attacker, but it seems like there were problems, even at the time:

After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she described her assailant’s features to the police, but the resulting composite sketch didn’t resemble him, she wrote.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker.
But she identified a different man as her attacker in a police lineup. In her memoir, she writes that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that moments after she made her choice, she felt she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.

…

In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. 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. Sebold’s later testimony.

Kind of interestingly, this whole thing was triggered by a planned film version of the book:

Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” Mr. Mucciante said in an interview.
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.

He hired a PI, they gathered evidence, they approached a lawyer (and, coincidentally, Mr. Broadwater hired the same lawyer), one thing led to another which led to the motion to vacate the conviction, and Mr. Broadwater is no longer a sex offender.

Ms. Sebold had no comment on the decision, a spokesman for Scribner, which published “Lucky,” said. The spokesman said that the publisher had no plans to update the text.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 24th, 2021 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Books, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.