See exclusive court video as Anthony Broadwater is cleared of Alice Sebold’s rape 40 years later

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Syracuse, NY — Anthony Broadwater collapsed on his lawyers’ shoulders, sobbing, as a Syracuse judge exonerated him last week of the 1981 rape of Alice Sebold, now a best-selling author who started her career with a memoir, “Lucky,” about her ordeal.

Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard broke the story and was the only media present as state Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy presided over the extraordinary drama in a Syracuse courtroom, four days before Thanksgiving.

We’ve taken that exclusive footage - along with other reporting and images - and published it the video above. It features Broadwater, his lawyers David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, Judge Cuffy and Syracuse District Attorney William Fitzpatrick -- who joined in the request to exonerate Broadwater 40 years after the crime.

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

In the days after the court hearing, Broadwater’s exoneration has become international news: the extraordinary reversal of a rape conviction at the center of the one of America’s foremost memoirs by a rape victim. Articles on the case and photos have appeared from Canada to Russia to Australia.

The story has reverberated across social media too, with some criticizing Sebold for her role in the wrongful conviction and others defending her as an unquestionable victim of rape.

Broadwater, as prosecutors conceded in 1981 and now, was convicted at trial solely on Sebold’s identification of him at trial -- after picking a different man out of an earlier police lineup -- and a reliance on microscopic hair analysis, which was decades later deemed junk science by the FBI.

Anthony Broadwater cries and holds his wife Elizabeth after Judge Gordon Cuffy overturned his 40-year-old rape conviction. Monday, Nov. 22, 2021 (Katrina Tulloch | ktulloch@syracuse.com)

The Nov. 22 hearing happened after a producer, Timothy Mucciante, hired to make a movie out of Sebold’s “Lucky” left the film production and hired a Syracuse private investigator, Dan Myers, to track down Broadwater -- now a 61-year-old man struggling to make ends meet as a convicted felon and registered sex offender.

Myers brought Broadwater’s case to Syracuse defense lawyers David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, who successfully lobbied Fitzpatrick, the current DA, to reexamine the long-ago conviction. Knowing the hair analysis constituted junk science, the DA was also swayed by Sebold’s mistaken identification at a police lineup before Broadwater’s trial.

At the court appearance last week, Fitzpatrick said that Broadwater should have been released as soon as Sebold picked the wrong man out of the lineup. Fitzpatrick last week said Broadwater had to suffer because of a conviction that never should have happened.

At the rape trial, Sebold identified Broadwater as the rapist, but he was the only Black man in the courtroom.

Decades ago, DNA samples from Sebold’s rape kit were destroyed, long before the advent of modern DNA technology, leaving little chance now to track down the actual rapist.

Eight days after Broadwater’s exoneration, Sebold broke her silence by self-publishing an apology in which she calls him an “innocent man.” Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard was the first to report Broadwater’s response to the apology, which he called “sincerely from her heart” and said he accepted.

Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.

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. Broadwater was released in 1999, and has remained in the state’s public sex offender registry. Nov. 22, 2021. (Katrina Tulloch | ktulloch@syracuse.com)

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