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“*Sebold went to police, but she didn’t know the man’s name and an initial sweep of the area failed to locate him. An officer suggested the man in the street must have been Broadwater, who had supposedly been seen in the area*…”
“*…After Broadwater was arrested, though, Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker*…”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/conviction-overturned-in-1981-rape-of-author-alice-sebold
The one and only time I have been summoned for jury duty They basically straight up asked me if I was willing to convict someone on drug possession charges without any evidence. Besides eyewitness testimony from the cop. I asked them why was the evidence not collected if the cop witnessed it himself apparently they didn't like that because I wasn't chosen....
Tbh I’d answer them yes, sit on the jury while taking PTO, let everything go smooth, then change my mind as some people do once seeing the evidence or lack thereof. It’s not illegal to change my mind.
In 1981, Uebelhoer, then an assistant Onondaga County prosecutor, forged ahead with the rape case against Broadwater despite knowing that Sebold, a Syracuse University freshman at the time, had picked a different man as her attacker out of a police lineup.
The whole duke lacrosse saga was insane. The prosecutor knew so early that they were innocent, but he wanted to get a political win by trying to put what were seen as “rich, privileged frat dudes that think they can get away with anything.” And the entire county basically set out to ruin their lives for months, and were pretty successful, while the prosecutor knew the whole time they were innocent. Eventually he got disbarred and I believe one day in jail, and the “victim” is in prison for murder. But those dudes lives were already ruined and even after the facts came out a lot of the country was like fine, maybe they didn’t do this one, but they’re rich lacrosse bros so they’ve probably done others so fuck them anyway.
The uva fiasco didn’t last as long and no one was risking jail time but it’s so bad because even the most basic research at all would have shown it never happened. Like uva doesn’t even have fall rush for freshmen. But everyone went out to try and destroy the guys in that frats life, even though they wouldn’t have even been in the frat when it supposedly happened. But that was ok because they were frat bros.
Regardless of your opinion on fraternities, they are not full of violent rapists. Like how many of those do you think there even are? And 90% of them are people no one would want in their frat regardless.
That one was just so bad because it took someone like 30 mins of research to prove it never happened. The original article just wrote down whatever the “victim” said without even bothering to double check anything.
Why would police cough up that the witness identified the wrong person? What the jury sees and hears is very often not the "facts of the case".
It's somewhat scary how little Americans know about their own justice system. For a few quick spoilers - eye witness testimony is bullshit, "lie detectors" are pseudoscience, and confessions of crime are meaningless in most states due to laws surrounding interrogation.
As for court proceedings, judges and prosecutors are often more concerned with public perceptions of "the system", to the point that evidence of being innocent is rarely enough to exonerate someone, public defenders can be so overwhelmed that they basically go into cases blind leading to people being guilty due to obvious alibis (e.g., evidence that the defendant was in another state), and jury selection is about as easy to bias today as you would expect of jury selection during the height of the Jim Crow era.
In America, being innocent is NOT a get out of jail free card. If you don't have money and/or media attention, it's pretty much a coin flip whether you get a fair trial or not.
Not even just forensics (for which, you are right, outside of DNA most of it is complete pseudoscientific BS--even things like fingerprint analysis isn't anywhere near as standardized or reliable as TV would have you believe).
Witness testimony is the bedrock of the justice system. Tons of cases are prosecuted with no real evidence outside of witness testimony. However, [witness testimony is not super reliable.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/)
Even when people who are doing their best to be honest, with police and prosecutors doing their best not to influence them, eyewitness can testify to fundamentally untrue things just due to the flawed nature of human memory. People can genuinely believe they saw things that never happened, heard things that were never said, or remember wildly inaccurate details.
Add in police or prosecutors influencing them (knowingly or unknowingly)? Then you really can't ever trust a single witness beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction if you're familiar with the reality behind it all, imo.
DNA, video evidence, or witness testimony corroborated by numerous other independent witnesses or many other pieces of physical evidence like paper records, etc. But needing all of that for a criminal conviction would mean more than half of all cases would be dismissed--because one or two witnesses is frequently all there is.
It all puts the criminal justice system in a horrible bind if you think too hard about it all.
I knew a neighbor sentenced to 25 years in prison based on 30-year-old DNA evidence. The DNA had degraded so much that it matched 1 out of 1000 people. This case shows how old unreliable DNA can be used in securing convictions.
It's also heartbreaking how many inmates are abuse victims who lashed out in self-defense.
One of my closest friends, a STEM genius, literally had a degree for every letter, endured physical abuse from his father as a kid.
He often came to school with bruises, a black eye, or even a broken arm. We were kids so we didn't think too much of it. Even Joking thet he was a secret cage fighter, since it was funny imaging the kind of person who was upset all day after stepping on a snail being in a cage fight.
But the teachers certainly knew something was up and apparently they called the cops, but nothing happened.
Later, my friend was arrested for GBH for defending himself against his father who had pushed him to the ground and choked him. The father had bite and scratch marks mmmm... I wonder why?
Even worse according to the family the father said he wanted to drop the charges but the cops wouldn't let him.
I just think this highlights deep flaws in our justice system. And the need to discuss and bring these hidden stories to light so that this doesn't happen again.
I feel like growing up I've learned that anything that is not DNA evidence in conjunction with recorded video evidence (ideally film) should be somewhat suspect.
Fingerprints may be useful if the suspect pool is limited, but their interpretation is still too subjective to be damning evidence.
Prosecutor needs to be charged…
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2024/03/judge-refuses-immunity-to-prosecutor-who-made-crucial-mistake-in-alice-sebold-rape-case.html
Perfect example of how you never want to find your fate being decided by a "jury of your peers" Our system is fucked. We have gravitated to guilty until proven innocent in this country. And we let random people from the community decide as jurors. We need a better system.
yeah most of my "peers" are straight up demented. Maybe a jury of educated people perhaps who specilize in aspects of criminology? No? Joe shmoe from the gas station who does meth every weekend? Yes? okay sure, Judicial system
> Maybe a jury of educated people perhaps who specilize in aspects of criminology?
Those are the ones with careers and actually making money, thus the first ones to beg to excused.
You realize that the attorneys get a say in who is on the jury, right? If your defense attorney allows Joe Shmoe from the gas station who does meth every weekend on the jury, then that's kind of on your attorney.
You only get two veto’s. At best the defense gets half the jurors they want and the prosecution gets half the jurors they want. In reality, the prosecutor leads jury selection and juries tend to believe the judge, prosecutor, and system, because they see them as having authority.
There was no jury. His lawyer took a gamble and opted for a bench trial.
>Paquette, Broadwater’s lawyer, was thinking about his client’s skin color when he took perhaps the biggest gamble in the case: waiving a jury trial and putting Broadwater’s fate in the hands of a judge.
>In a recent interview, Paquette said he was worried that an all-white jury — as many were in 1981 — might convict Broadwater despite the lack of evidence.
>Gorman, the judge assigned to the case, stood out from some of his peers at the time as being fair-minded, veteran attorneys say. If there were a judge to trust, it was Gorman, local lawyers agree.
>Gorman was unique in other ways: He lived out of town, in Binghamton, and he had been appointed to the bench by the state legislature, so he did not have to get elected.
> “Throughout trial, I believed that Judge Gorman would be sensitive to Alice and her situation, but that he’d have to conclude that her case was legally insufficient," Paquette said. "As much as his heart would go out to her, I thought he would do the right thing."
[https://www.syracuse.com/news/2022/01/alice-sebold-case-how-race-and-incompetence-doomed-anthony-broadwater-to-prison.html](https://www.syracuse.com/news/2022/01/alice-sebold-case-how-race-and-incompetence-doomed-anthony-broadwater-to-prison.html)
Edit: formatting
Very common for several layers of decision makers with discretion to stop the process to all pass the buck because it’s “not their job.”
Cops arrest and pass it to the DA because it’s not their job to figure out if he did it.
DA brings charges because if it’s not right, it’ll get sorted by the judge.
Judge let’s the case get to the jury because it’s not his job to decide the facts.
Jury sees that 3 layers of professionals have all approved this thing and presented it to them and they reasonably conclude that it must be a good case worth convicting on.
At the end of it, nobody really thinks it’s the right thing, but none of them stood up and said so and the machine grinds forward based purely on inertia once it gets set in motion.
I served on a grand jury once. We heard maybe 20 cases over the course of that week, maybe more. Most are open-and-shut indictments with clear evidence. There was one though, with only circumstantial evidence and frankly, most of us on the jury had really grown a disliking for a particular Assistant DA. It was a non-violent drug offense of a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. We let him walk, even though I think we were all pretty sure he was "letter-of-the-law" guilty. I think we all did it to ease our conscience after indicting so many people on relatively petty crimes for a week straight. The scales of justice can be tipped sometimes, ever so slightly.
The sad thing about this is that this is not the only time something like this has happened.
>
> “…After Broadwater was arrested, though, Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker…”
I've heard so many stories exactly like this where a black man was wrongly convicted.
Same. It’s a textbook example of *systematic* racism. So many people failed. The police. The DA. The judge. The jury. I put the majority of the blame on the police and the prosecutor. They knew the lineup failed and they had little other evidence other than a supposed hair match that was bunk science.
I was thinking the same thing. The news framed it in an accusatory way. “The author apologized but how do you undo such a life altering mistake?” It’s not her responsibility to undo it, just like it wasn’t her responsibility to convict him.
I mean, she stood in a court of law, under oath, and in no unclear way identified him as her rapist. Knowing she failed to identify him in a lineup, knowing she couldn't picture the man's face from the street.
She then wrote a book, and got a movie deal, on the back of this without any effort to rectify the consequences of her actions.
Whether manipulation occurred in the proceedings or not, pretending like she shouldn't hold any liability in this is just wrong.
To be fair, it's not that hard for the prosecution to convince the defendent/witnesses that the person standing before them is the one they saw committing the crime.
And she did write a book about her ordeal, but the movie mentioned was based on a different book that had nothing to do with it (unless there was another movie made about that book that wasn't mentioned here).
Find Dr. Julia Shaw's Book called "The Memory Illusion", where she delves deeply into the concept of false memories and how people can inadvertently create and believe in them.
I love this passage from it that I store in my notes:
> On my first day in the first memory class I ever took at university I remember
the professor picking up a piece of paper. He waited for the eager class of 150
students to settle down, then held up the unfolded sheet of paper and
proclaimed: "This is what happens in the world around us." He then folded the
paper in half. "This is what you perceive." He folded the paper in half
again. "This is what you pay attention to." He folded the paper in half
again. "This is what you are interested in." Another fold. "This is what the
brain makes into engrams. And this ..." (he folded the paper on final time; it
was now a fraction of its original size) "is what you are able to access and
recall later on."
>The confused class looked around at each other. What was his point? He broke the
silence by saying "Let's make sure this piece of paper is as big as possible
when we are done with this class."
Looks like NY state settled with him for [$5.5m](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/nyregion/anthony-broadwater-alice-sebold-wrongful-conviction.html#:~:text=Anthony%20J.,in%20her%20memoir%20%E2%80%9CLucky.%E2%80%9D).
Not only sue her, but every single dollar she made off of her memoir should go to him - with interest and any future earnings on the publication should go to him as well. She should also have to pay him $5.5 million in my opinion.
It wasn't really her fault though. After she thought she recognized him on the street, police took Broadwater in to see if Sebold could identify him out of a lineup.
She failed to do so, picking someone else in the lineup as her rapist. Instead of doing the responsible and logical thing and concluding that the traumatized Sebold was (understandably) unable to accurately identify her rapist, police and the prosecutor coached her until she said Broadwater was actually the rapist. Police told her she had picked a different man than the one she saw on the street (Broadwater) and she said they looked identical and she couldn't tell them apart. Police and the prosecutor then lied to her and told her that Broadwater and the man she picked out of the lineup originally were friends and had intentionally dressed in a similar way to confuse her so she should just change her identification and pick Broadwater because they were more interested in getting a conviction than in getting any kind of justice.
Personally, I'm going to blame the law enforcement professionals who had a duty to be objective and protect everyone's rights but intentionally did the opposite over the traumatized 18 year old rape victim they manipulated in order to get a conviction.
Exactly.
The burden of proof wasn't on her. It was the Police investigators and the DA that were required to prove he was the correct person. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously bad evidence.
There needs to be more accountability force law enforcement and prosecution that do shady things to get convictions.
The biggest crime of all is that the REAL rapist never got charged and most likely went on to rape more people.
You missed the part where she was actually raped, and didn't even identify Broadwater as her attacker in the lineup, then the prosecutor lied to her to get her to pick Broadwater instead. It's entirely the police and the prosecutor here.
Already answered this so I’ll paste my reply:
If you read the article you would know this:
>Police arrested Broadwater, who was given the pseudonym Gregory Madison in Lucky, but Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker.
>**Broadwater was nonetheless tried and convicted in 1982 after Sebold identified him as her rapist on the witness stand** and an expert said microscopic hair analysis had tied him to the crime. That type of analysis has since been deemed junk science by the US Department of Justice.
She failed to identify him in a line up but the DA decided to proceed with a case against him anyway. She knew she failed to identify him in a line up but still chose to testify at his trial and say he was the one who raped her.
I fully believe she was raped. I also fully believe she testified against a man without being 100% certain it was him and the jury convicted him because of it. She then made millions off of this story because she based “The Lovely Bones” on what happened to her as well as named him as her rapist in her memoirs. That is libel and she’s guilty of defamation- intentional or unintentional (I believe it to be unintentional) she should still have to pay him all of the money she made from it. It’s quite literally the absolute least she could do.
The state put him away with a shitty process it sounds like. She failed to identify him in a line up yet he was still put away for 16 years. Just a lazy ass system that apparently doesn't require due diligence. Makes no sense how little it takes to ruin an innocent person's life with our own legal system meant to protect us.
The other problem is, if she was really assaulted, then the real assailant was never subdued and probably raped many more who were too traumatized to report it. So an innocent man was jailed and the real criminal was free to continue assaulting other women. A real lose lose, but at least the prosecute was able to mark a win.
Feels like it shouldn't be the taxpayers burden but rather the accuser's, who wrongly testified against him for a crime he didn't commit. I get that she was truly assaulted, but she should've known that convicting an innocent man wouldn't have brought her justice. The system heavily relied on her testimony and she lied under oath, whether deliberate or not, she committed a crime.
Edit: After further reading I found that Broadwater accepted Sebold's apology as she acknowledged the mistake made by her AND the justice system which ruined an innocent man's life, much like how the r*pe ruined her's. We can't know for sure what her intentions were as an 18 year old. But based on her apology it is safe to say she feels terrible for what happened.
PS: I just want to bring to light the struggle the man went through. Thankfully, HBO is making a docu-series about him and this case. I encourage everyone to check it out when it comes out.
Edit2: I want everyone to know that what I said isn't meant to discourage any victim of r*pe from stepping forward and reporting the incident. I still believe that women must be heard and we must believe victims of assault. The reason I asked for her to be held accountable is because of the discrepancies in her story which were found by the producer himself while reading "Lucky". Also, she claimed Broadwater was talking to her that day outside the restaurant, when he was actually speaking to someone else he recognized. This man was discharged from the Marines to care for his father (who had stomach cancer). His life changed when he was found guilty of this crime. He was sent to prison where he could have been killed. After his release, he chose to not have children because he was still a "registered sex offender". But it is hard for me to ignore two huge facts, 1. Broadwater had no role in her assault, 2. Sebold had a role, no matter how insignificant, in Broadwater's conviction.
According to the article, there was a bit of prosecutorial misconduct involved. The investigators apparently lied to the victim about the people she saw in a line-up (where she picked a different guy). They basically coached her to then pick the guy that ultimately went to jail.
This type of coaching is super common, unfortunately.
It is helpful in convicting guilty and innocent people; ultimately this seems to become popular because jurries are often "dumb" and get easily confused.
My mom was once robbed of her purse, and was later called to the station to pick the guy out of a lineup. She admitted to the cops that she wasn’t sure, but made her best guess. The cops laughed and said “No one ever gets these right. The guy that actually robbed you was arrested in possession of your purse, and he was the one guy that you eliminated confidently”. It was a great experience in how unreliable witnesses can be, even when trying their best.
Yeah it's crazy how cops will coach a witness to make certain statements simply because they have already put work into investigating that suspect. They don't want to have to start over the investigation with a new suspect.
The entire system is the problem. There is pressure from the top to find someone and build the best case against them. Even if they know they aren't guilty.
> Yep, the innocense files on netflix would make you worry about ever being accused.
Existing in America was good enough for me to know I'd never put my trust in a jury of my "peers".
Dumb or no, I think the juries' larger problem is just trusting the wrong people. They presume the prosecutors know what they're doing and are working in the public interest.
God I hate that shit. Cops are allowed to lie to you and prosecutors will do this kind of “coaching” bullshit. And then when it comes out, they will never admit that they did anything wrong
For what it's worth, cops are absolutely not allowed to lie to victims to sway something like an identification. Of course it happens, but if it comes to light it would absolutely be used by defense to try and have an ID thrown out. I guess in theory if there was an uncooperative victim who was lying to the cops and they used a ruse to obtain information from them, that'd be one thing, but that's where the victim already has the info and is simply not disclosing it. For ID or the like, the science has meant there's generally a great deal of guidelines in departments to guard against improper influence on victims and witnesses, since otherwise a good defense attorney will stand a solid chance of getting it thrown out.
Edit: typo
Just to hop onto your comment. A lot of this stuff is no longer allowed. This case is from 1981, where current police police procedures were a lot different.
To do photo line ups and field line ups now, police have to read a form verbatim (of course some officers may not follow instructions) so that the instructions are as least suggestive as possible.
For photo line ups, best practice requires a police officer who has no relation with the case to administer it. So that the officer who is administering the test themselves have no idea who the actual suspect is and can't influence the victim.
Well, if that's true, then I stand corrected. I feel bad for the woman as she was, once again, robbed of her agency. But I can't help but feel terribly bad for the gentleman who lost half his life just for being in the same neighborhood as her.
In cases like this, I always fear it's worse. This guy has his life destroyed, but what about the real rapist? It's unlikely he just stopped, so how many other women were raped because the real guy was allowed to walk free?
There is a difference between willingly accusing someone you know did not commit a crime, and accusing someone you think commited the crime. I remember a similar case décades ago, a woman raped in her home who positively identified her rapist, twice. The détective said she was the "perfect" victim: she did not take a shower, she carefully watched her rapist, etc. Two trials and she's still adamant. Then years later, an inmate brags to his cell companion that an innocent had been convicted for one of his rape. DNA testing later, the innocent guy was freed, the woman was mortified: thé two guys did not even look alike. The only way she thinks this happened is because it was a mainly White neighborhood, that the wrongly convicted guy came by sometimes and that her brains associated both men.
It was a documentary about the weakness of human witness, btw
Édit: French autocorrect mistake
No... you'd think, but you should look into witness misidentification research and stats. It's really alarming how terrible people are at recognizing random people. It really shouldn't be given the weight it is.
Had she said "my friend, Zeus, did it", that's different and on her.
But reading the details here, that should not have been enough to convict him. Enough to investigate him, sure, but it reads like they didn't have enough evidence yet locked him up anyways.
It seems that she genuinely believed it was him, and was simply mistaken. Trauma is weird and can do that.
To me, it *does* seem appropriate to hold the system accountable for this. Convicting on victim testimony is not "beyond all reasonable doubt," even if the victim sincerely believes it. There should have been some evidentiary expectation.
Yeah a major issue is reliance on witnesses given how easily we misremember what happened and missremember what a person looked like, was wearing, and so on
>Feels like it shouldn't be the taxpayers burden
This system failed him so it should be the system paying. The system imprisoned him without enough evidence there should have been something else other than her testimony of meeting a random man on the street, it's the system's fault.
It's not lying under oath if she honestly thought he was the rapist. She wasn't thinking that she was convicting an innocent man either. Do you really think she was just maliciously trying to lock up some random innocent man who vaguely matched her memory of her attacker?
I guess in an ideal world the jury would be aware of the (un)reliability of people's memory in situations like this and wouldn't convict based on her identification alone.
Shifting the blame to witnesses and victims who are found to have misremembered things sounds like a good way to make everyone fearful of going to court. We know there are a lot of actual rape cases that get dropped or where the defendant is found not guilty where the defendant did actually do it. It's just very hard to prove a lot of the time. If those women who accused someone who is 'not guilty' are at risk of being fined for it, it's going to prevent a lot of people ever coming forward.
People are going to testify to the best of their ability, but we know witness testimony is a horribly bad chance of actually picking correct people out of a line, so at best it's a piece of the puzzle. It's up to the prosecutor to form a justified and decent case against the accused. On the other hand you can definitely counter sue if it's possible to prove the accuser has made false testimony on purpose.
She didn't convict him and lock him up, the state did. I doubt she would have gone through with all that if she wasn't sure in her mind he was the one who did it, it is the fault of the court for convicting the man without sufficient evidence.
I agree we, taxpayers, foot the bill for a lot of shit we shouldn't have to pay for.
Billing people who gave what they believed to be true testimony would be an incredibly dangerous precedent, however.
The accuser won't have any money to pay the falsely convicted person in most cases, certainly not $5.5m. It is also the state that convicted him and imprisoned him. It's a failure of the justice system, who the accuser is and what motivated them isn't really all that important, it's the state's fault.
I remember seeing this on the Registry of Exonerations. He didn't just spend 16 years in prison, he spent more than that outside it as a registered sex offender, living under harsh restrictions for something he didn't do.
That tracks better with his age considering she's accusing someone of having attacked her on a college campus you would presume it's someone around college age
And he was only convicted based on the writer testimony? No ADN tests, injuries, other witness, etc?
It seems she basically just chose a random guy to point the finger at.
Hair science, which has since been discarded as junk science and is the factor in a lot of exonerations. Otherwise, as far I as recall, just regular misidentification, which is another common factor in exonerations.
apparently the police/prosecutor chose the guy and coached her into saying it was him? at least that seems to be the prevailing opinion in this thread, anyway.
How tf can anybody be imprisoned for 16 years based on a single eye witness testimony in the first place? The legal system shouldn’t even be setup to allow that regardless of false accusations.
He was denied parole five times because he refused to say he did it.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/24/us/anthony-broadwater-alice-sebold-rape-exoneration/index.html
Yeah, it's fucking horrifying.
The west Memphis three got hit with the same shit. In order to get out they had to agree that the state, which railroaded them in an outrageously corrupt manner, had done nothing wrong in convicting them. One of them said he only took the deal because he didn't believe one of the others would survive another year or two in prison while waiting for further appeals
Surprised that people in the comments section are baffled that he got convicted. He was a Black man accused of raping a white woman, he already had one foot in the grave. But his lawyers really fucked up though,
I mean not to be too poetic, but he probably did. I can't imagine what this poor tortured soul must have gone through. This is such a scary story, a rapist got away with it and an innocent man went to prison for a long long time. Awful everything
5.5m would be accepted if it was for each year of the sentence, but to be just 5.5m of a bloody settlement for the scummy city ruining his life forever? Hell no.
5.5 is just under $*3*0/hr for 16 years, with 1.5x overtime after 40hr/wk
but he got *no* time off whatsoever. he had *no* life of his own for that *entire* time. the sacrifice of that is immeasurable.
Witnesses are notoriously bad at remembering anything. Even four or more witnesses all “saw”/“heard” the same thing in other cases only to be proved wrong with DNA or video evidence.
I’m not saying witnesses are always wrong, but if witnesses testimony is the foundation for a crime then it is not beyond a reasonable doubt. The exception would be co-conspirator or accomplice.
I’ve been telling people that Brock Allan Turner the rapist was in jail for more time than he was! I’ll make a note of the shameful sentence Brock Allan Turner the rapist served
How did she accuse a black man when the one who committed the crime was white? If he was masked, how could she just say it was him? This is so infuriating.
She didn't accuse him, she just said that she saw her attacker in that area, when she was supposed to identify her attacker she pointed out someone else, but the cops pressured her into choosing him
This seems like obvious felony charges for the prosecutors. Falsifying evidence, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, false charges, intimidation, even rising to the level of criminal conspiracy since they are working with other police to cover up, create, and manipulate a crime. Aggravating factor that someone is doing this under color of law from a position of authority, so sentences would be further increased.
This is one of the highest levels of injustice that can happen in a system short of physical violence being used.
It happens way more often than you would think. “It” being wrongful convictions. There’s nonprofits, like The Innocence Project, working to fix this, but unfortunately, a lot of people just want to put someone in jail and stop thinking about it.
Sex Crimes are disgusting, but if anyone really thinks it's about genitals and sex they're wildly ignorant of the realities; it's about power and chopping parts off won't change that even if you have the right guy.
Yep; I can't believe people find it acceptable to make such decisions that can never be undone, when the chance of it being a false conviction is absolutely non-negliable. How do people have such sheer lack of empathy, self-awareness, and/or conscience?
They are just fucking stupid. They genuinely believe the system would never fail and/or be abused in any way. It isn't even a question of empathy here. I myself believe some people should be straight up killed but the government is the last thing you should trust with that kind of power. How someone can lack critical thinking skills to understand something so simple is beyond me....
Biggest reason why I'll never vote for a "tough on crime" candidate. I'm not even sure there's evidence they do any better job at catching actual criminals, and they cause such harm to innocent people when cops/prosecutors are more concerned with arrest/conviction rates than with getting it right.
There was "physical evidence" it was just before DNA evidence, so they were using some kind of hair analysis that was subsequently proved to not actually be science.
There are so many institutional failings here that the state should pay out. There is also a huge civil suit that should be explored to the fullest extent.
The Justice system in the USA is scary. Gotta fill those prisons up eh? Sickening. To know you can just be arrested, get an unfair trial and spend your life in fucking jail. Horrifying.
It wasn’t a false accusation, it was a false identification.
Alice Sebold was absolutely raped, but the cops pushed her to ID a suspect they had already identified, who is the man this video describes.
This is a failure of policing
She said she saw her rapist, then went to the police. The police brought in a bunch of guys for a lineup and she did not identify Broadwater as the guy. How he still ended up being found guilty, i have no idea.
Everything I read about this gets even worse than the last thing. Let me get this straight she;
- Was raped by a man
- Happened to walk into a man she believes was her rapist (or very much looked like him)
- Police bring in a bunch of men and she identified one
- But they still picked a different man than the one she identified
So It's completely possible that there were four completely different men in this story, the rapist, the man she walked into on the street, the man she identified in a lineup, and then Broadwater.
That's fucking craaaazy.
It wasn’t a false accusation. She absolutely was raped but misidentified her attacker. The rest was a miscarriage of justice. She didn’t choose him in the lineup (the prosecutor lied and told her he’d intentionally got a plant to stand who looked similar to confuse her), the cops had done nothing when she first reported it so they were now saving face, sounds like his lawyer was an imbecile as no witnesses were called. Huge miscarriage of justice with 2 young kids caught in the middle.
"At the [police lineup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_lineup), which included Broadwater, Sebold had identified a different person as her rapist. When police told her she had identified someone other than Broadwater, she said the two men looked "almost identical".[^(\[17\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sebold#cite_note-AP-17) Defense attorneys arguing for Broadwater's exoneration asserted that, after the lineup, the prosecutor lied to Sebold, telling her that the man she had identified and Broadwater were friends, and that they both came to the lineup to confuse her.[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sebold#cite_note-:1-8) They also stated that Sebold wrote in *Lucky* that the prosecutor coached her into changing her identification.[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sebold#cite_note-:2-9) In 2021, Broadwater's new attorneys argued that this influenced Sebold's testimony"
i wonder why Brock Turner got 6 months with concrete evidence and literally being caught in the act and constrained until the police showed up, but this guy got 16 years with one eyewitness claim
This man deserves way more than 5.5 million. 16 years of your life that you can never get back and all you're given as 'compensation' is 5.5 million? This is unacceptable and the accuser should be put in prison for the same amount of time as him so she can feel what he had to go through.
Meanwhile, a man convicted of 34 felonies HE DEFINITELY committed, and that isn’t even his multiple sexual harassment allegations or the betrayal of an entire nation IS STILL being considered for the position of leader of the free world… Murica!
I get that she picked the wrong guy but the fact that the justice system didn't have enough proof to convict him is unforgiveable. Guilty men have gotten off with more damning evidence
Did she believe he was her rapiest? If so then I’d say it is the states fault and not hers. She was rapped she just had the wrong person. The burden of proof is on the state.
Is 40 dollars an hour to spend 16 years in prison as a labeled sex offender worth the incredible injustice caused by this? I don’t think so. Someone should be held accountable whether that is the people working the case or the person purposely misidentifying someone.
Police have one job and that is to close cases. Thats how their performance is judged. Whether they do so accurately does not matter at all. In this case it resulted in a conviction. That would go in their book as a win!
This happens every day in America. But what are you gonna do about it? No one cares until it happens to them. And then, its too late.
no, the state did.
Her testimony should never have been enough. And she literally pointed out the wrong person on a line up. She was actually raped by someone and that trauma caused her to think he was the person that did it.
from what I've read about this, it wasn't a matter of false accusation - it was a matter of the cops convincing her he was the rapist. As usual, they pick someone to be the "criminal" and work backwards to get a conviction. And, face it, at 18, no doubt she was easily convinced by the cops. They keep at you until you doubt your own memory, wearing you down, until you just give in and do what they want.. She comes in, a rape victim, already a mess from the crime itself, and the cops go to work on her, to get her to ID a person so they can close the case. The fact they had no other evidence, says that fact very loudly.
Plus, the fact the parole boards kept him in jail because he would not admit to a crime he did not commit, says a lot of bad about the board. Like the cops, all they wanted was to punish somebody.
So I would not blame her. Heck, I think she should sue the cops, too..
Misleading headline. It wasn’t a false accusation by the victim. The police picked him as the suspect, ran him in front of the victim and she did not pick him, and he still got convicted. This is police misconduct and prosecutorial error. Not a false accusation by the victim.
This story is fucking tragic all around.
Firstly, this man went to prison for a crime he didn't commit.
Secondly, the actual rapist got away with it.
And I just want to add, for anyone hating on the rape victim, it wasn't her job to gather evidence and prove this man was her rapist, it was the Police investigators and the district attorneys office that had that job.
Both the police and the DA both let down the victim and society at large.
People should read about this instead of a chopped up reel. More like police and prosecutor needed to get stars up. https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-syracuse-william-fitzpatrick-alice-sebold-2cb1b731f915d7d44bf14728a791bc61
I routinely have to remind people that we have a legal system, not a “justice” system. The number one priority of our legal system is to protect itself from scrutiny. Justice can be an outcome, but it’s never assured. Anyone who pretends that our legal system is a justice system, is a charlatan.
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“*Sebold went to police, but she didn’t know the man’s name and an initial sweep of the area failed to locate him. An officer suggested the man in the street must have been Broadwater, who had supposedly been seen in the area*…” “*…After Broadwater was arrested, though, Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker*…” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/conviction-overturned-in-1981-rape-of-author-alice-sebold
Was there a jury? I can’t understand how he could be convicted on this evidence.
The one and only time I have been summoned for jury duty They basically straight up asked me if I was willing to convict someone on drug possession charges without any evidence. Besides eyewitness testimony from the cop. I asked them why was the evidence not collected if the cop witnessed it himself apparently they didn't like that because I wasn't chosen....
Now you know how jury’s go
Tbh I’d answer them yes, sit on the jury while taking PTO, let everything go smooth, then change my mind as some people do once seeing the evidence or lack thereof. It’s not illegal to change my mind.
Color of his skin in 1980's. That is pretty much the wild card here.
In 1981, Uebelhoer, then an assistant Onondaga County prosecutor, forged ahead with the rape case against Broadwater despite knowing that Sebold, a Syracuse University freshman at the time, had picked a different man as her attacker out of a police lineup.
So why didn't she write a book about that she seemed content that at least someone was in jail
Valid point
The whole duke lacrosse saga was insane. The prosecutor knew so early that they were innocent, but he wanted to get a political win by trying to put what were seen as “rich, privileged frat dudes that think they can get away with anything.” And the entire county basically set out to ruin their lives for months, and were pretty successful, while the prosecutor knew the whole time they were innocent. Eventually he got disbarred and I believe one day in jail, and the “victim” is in prison for murder. But those dudes lives were already ruined and even after the facts came out a lot of the country was like fine, maybe they didn’t do this one, but they’re rich lacrosse bros so they’ve probably done others so fuck them anyway. The uva fiasco didn’t last as long and no one was risking jail time but it’s so bad because even the most basic research at all would have shown it never happened. Like uva doesn’t even have fall rush for freshmen. But everyone went out to try and destroy the guys in that frats life, even though they wouldn’t have even been in the frat when it supposedly happened. But that was ok because they were frat bros. Regardless of your opinion on fraternities, they are not full of violent rapists. Like how many of those do you think there even are? And 90% of them are people no one would want in their frat regardless. That one was just so bad because it took someone like 30 mins of research to prove it never happened. The original article just wrote down whatever the “victim” said without even bothering to double check anything.
Why would police cough up that the witness identified the wrong person? What the jury sees and hears is very often not the "facts of the case". It's somewhat scary how little Americans know about their own justice system. For a few quick spoilers - eye witness testimony is bullshit, "lie detectors" are pseudoscience, and confessions of crime are meaningless in most states due to laws surrounding interrogation. As for court proceedings, judges and prosecutors are often more concerned with public perceptions of "the system", to the point that evidence of being innocent is rarely enough to exonerate someone, public defenders can be so overwhelmed that they basically go into cases blind leading to people being guilty due to obvious alibis (e.g., evidence that the defendant was in another state), and jury selection is about as easy to bias today as you would expect of jury selection during the height of the Jim Crow era. In America, being innocent is NOT a get out of jail free card. If you don't have money and/or media attention, it's pretty much a coin flip whether you get a fair trial or not.
A lot of forensic science is either total bullshit or not as concrete as TV would have you believe.
Not even just forensics (for which, you are right, outside of DNA most of it is complete pseudoscientific BS--even things like fingerprint analysis isn't anywhere near as standardized or reliable as TV would have you believe). Witness testimony is the bedrock of the justice system. Tons of cases are prosecuted with no real evidence outside of witness testimony. However, [witness testimony is not super reliable.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/) Even when people who are doing their best to be honest, with police and prosecutors doing their best not to influence them, eyewitness can testify to fundamentally untrue things just due to the flawed nature of human memory. People can genuinely believe they saw things that never happened, heard things that were never said, or remember wildly inaccurate details. Add in police or prosecutors influencing them (knowingly or unknowingly)? Then you really can't ever trust a single witness beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction if you're familiar with the reality behind it all, imo. DNA, video evidence, or witness testimony corroborated by numerous other independent witnesses or many other pieces of physical evidence like paper records, etc. But needing all of that for a criminal conviction would mean more than half of all cases would be dismissed--because one or two witnesses is frequently all there is. It all puts the criminal justice system in a horrible bind if you think too hard about it all.
I knew a neighbor sentenced to 25 years in prison based on 30-year-old DNA evidence. The DNA had degraded so much that it matched 1 out of 1000 people. This case shows how old unreliable DNA can be used in securing convictions. It's also heartbreaking how many inmates are abuse victims who lashed out in self-defense. One of my closest friends, a STEM genius, literally had a degree for every letter, endured physical abuse from his father as a kid. He often came to school with bruises, a black eye, or even a broken arm. We were kids so we didn't think too much of it. Even Joking thet he was a secret cage fighter, since it was funny imaging the kind of person who was upset all day after stepping on a snail being in a cage fight. But the teachers certainly knew something was up and apparently they called the cops, but nothing happened. Later, my friend was arrested for GBH for defending himself against his father who had pushed him to the ground and choked him. The father had bite and scratch marks mmmm... I wonder why? Even worse according to the family the father said he wanted to drop the charges but the cops wouldn't let him. I just think this highlights deep flaws in our justice system. And the need to discuss and bring these hidden stories to light so that this doesn't happen again.
I feel like growing up I've learned that anything that is not DNA evidence in conjunction with recorded video evidence (ideally film) should be somewhat suspect. Fingerprints may be useful if the suspect pool is limited, but their interpretation is still too subjective to be damning evidence.
DNA evidence is shaky too, with a much stronger likelihood of false matches than you have been led to believe.
Prosecutor needs to be charged… https://www.syracuse.com/news/2024/03/judge-refuses-immunity-to-prosecutor-who-made-crucial-mistake-in-alice-sebold-rape-case.html
Perfect example of how you never want to find your fate being decided by a "jury of your peers" Our system is fucked. We have gravitated to guilty until proven innocent in this country. And we let random people from the community decide as jurors. We need a better system.
yeah most of my "peers" are straight up demented. Maybe a jury of educated people perhaps who specilize in aspects of criminology? No? Joe shmoe from the gas station who does meth every weekend? Yes? okay sure, Judicial system
> Maybe a jury of educated people perhaps who specilize in aspects of criminology? Those are the ones with careers and actually making money, thus the first ones to beg to excused.
You realize that the attorneys get a say in who is on the jury, right? If your defense attorney allows Joe Shmoe from the gas station who does meth every weekend on the jury, then that's kind of on your attorney.
You only get two veto’s. At best the defense gets half the jurors they want and the prosecution gets half the jurors they want. In reality, the prosecutor leads jury selection and juries tend to believe the judge, prosecutor, and system, because they see them as having authority.
There was no jury. His lawyer took a gamble and opted for a bench trial. >Paquette, Broadwater’s lawyer, was thinking about his client’s skin color when he took perhaps the biggest gamble in the case: waiving a jury trial and putting Broadwater’s fate in the hands of a judge. >In a recent interview, Paquette said he was worried that an all-white jury — as many were in 1981 — might convict Broadwater despite the lack of evidence. >Gorman, the judge assigned to the case, stood out from some of his peers at the time as being fair-minded, veteran attorneys say. If there were a judge to trust, it was Gorman, local lawyers agree. >Gorman was unique in other ways: He lived out of town, in Binghamton, and he had been appointed to the bench by the state legislature, so he did not have to get elected. > “Throughout trial, I believed that Judge Gorman would be sensitive to Alice and her situation, but that he’d have to conclude that her case was legally insufficient," Paquette said. "As much as his heart would go out to her, I thought he would do the right thing." [https://www.syracuse.com/news/2022/01/alice-sebold-case-how-race-and-incompetence-doomed-anthony-broadwater-to-prison.html](https://www.syracuse.com/news/2022/01/alice-sebold-case-how-race-and-incompetence-doomed-anthony-broadwater-to-prison.html) Edit: formatting
Wow thank you for this, makes all the other comments about skin colour even more true!
Conviction was from her testimony and a hair sample (hair sample evidence is now "junk science")
Shouldn't have even made it to trial. Shame of the judge for even allowing this.
Very common for several layers of decision makers with discretion to stop the process to all pass the buck because it’s “not their job.” Cops arrest and pass it to the DA because it’s not their job to figure out if he did it. DA brings charges because if it’s not right, it’ll get sorted by the judge. Judge let’s the case get to the jury because it’s not his job to decide the facts. Jury sees that 3 layers of professionals have all approved this thing and presented it to them and they reasonably conclude that it must be a good case worth convicting on. At the end of it, nobody really thinks it’s the right thing, but none of them stood up and said so and the machine grinds forward based purely on inertia once it gets set in motion.
I think it's a Chinese(?) saying that "No single drop of rain thinks if caused the flood."
I served on a grand jury once. We heard maybe 20 cases over the course of that week, maybe more. Most are open-and-shut indictments with clear evidence. There was one though, with only circumstantial evidence and frankly, most of us on the jury had really grown a disliking for a particular Assistant DA. It was a non-violent drug offense of a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. We let him walk, even though I think we were all pretty sure he was "letter-of-the-law" guilty. I think we all did it to ease our conscience after indicting so many people on relatively petty crimes for a week straight. The scales of justice can be tipped sometimes, ever so slightly.
The sad thing about this is that this is not the only time something like this has happened. > > “…After Broadwater was arrested, though, Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker…” I've heard so many stories exactly like this where a black man was wrongly convicted.
Same. It’s a textbook example of *systematic* racism. So many people failed. The police. The DA. The judge. The jury. I put the majority of the blame on the police and the prosecutor. They knew the lineup failed and they had little other evidence other than a supposed hair match that was bunk science.
Lot of people in here pointing fingers at Sebold when it should be at the cops and judge.
Which is exacerbated by the 'false accusation' headline. News reporting this is scummy too
I was thinking the same thing. The news framed it in an accusatory way. “The author apologized but how do you undo such a life altering mistake?” It’s not her responsibility to undo it, just like it wasn’t her responsibility to convict him.
I mean, she stood in a court of law, under oath, and in no unclear way identified him as her rapist. Knowing she failed to identify him in a lineup, knowing she couldn't picture the man's face from the street. She then wrote a book, and got a movie deal, on the back of this without any effort to rectify the consequences of her actions. Whether manipulation occurred in the proceedings or not, pretending like she shouldn't hold any liability in this is just wrong.
To be fair, it's not that hard for the prosecution to convince the defendent/witnesses that the person standing before them is the one they saw committing the crime. And she did write a book about her ordeal, but the movie mentioned was based on a different book that had nothing to do with it (unless there was another movie made about that book that wasn't mentioned here).
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"On the witness stand, Sebold identified him as her rapist." Why would she do that?
Find Dr. Julia Shaw's Book called "The Memory Illusion", where she delves deeply into the concept of false memories and how people can inadvertently create and believe in them. I love this passage from it that I store in my notes: > On my first day in the first memory class I ever took at university I remember the professor picking up a piece of paper. He waited for the eager class of 150 students to settle down, then held up the unfolded sheet of paper and proclaimed: "This is what happens in the world around us." He then folded the paper in half. "This is what you perceive." He folded the paper in half again. "This is what you pay attention to." He folded the paper in half again. "This is what you are interested in." Another fold. "This is what the brain makes into engrams. And this ..." (he folded the paper on final time; it was now a fraction of its original size) "is what you are able to access and recall later on." >The confused class looked around at each other. What was his point? He broke the silence by saying "Let's make sure this piece of paper is as big as possible when we are done with this class."
Why did you not add this part: >"On the witness stand, Sebold identified him as her rapist."
It's extremely easy for police to push that. But it does place some responsibility on her shoulders
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Looks like NY state settled with him for [$5.5m](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/nyregion/anthony-broadwater-alice-sebold-wrongful-conviction.html#:~:text=Anthony%20J.,in%20her%20memoir%20%E2%80%9CLucky.%E2%80%9D).
That is not enough
Can't he sue her?
Not only sue her, but every single dollar she made off of her memoir should go to him - with interest and any future earnings on the publication should go to him as well. She should also have to pay him $5.5 million in my opinion.
And get 16 years in prison
Oof thats steep Make it 18
It wasn't really her fault though. After she thought she recognized him on the street, police took Broadwater in to see if Sebold could identify him out of a lineup. She failed to do so, picking someone else in the lineup as her rapist. Instead of doing the responsible and logical thing and concluding that the traumatized Sebold was (understandably) unable to accurately identify her rapist, police and the prosecutor coached her until she said Broadwater was actually the rapist. Police told her she had picked a different man than the one she saw on the street (Broadwater) and she said they looked identical and she couldn't tell them apart. Police and the prosecutor then lied to her and told her that Broadwater and the man she picked out of the lineup originally were friends and had intentionally dressed in a similar way to confuse her so she should just change her identification and pick Broadwater because they were more interested in getting a conviction than in getting any kind of justice. Personally, I'm going to blame the law enforcement professionals who had a duty to be objective and protect everyone's rights but intentionally did the opposite over the traumatized 18 year old rape victim they manipulated in order to get a conviction.
Put THEM in jail for 16 years.
Now that I can get behind
Put the fucking jail in jail.
The prosecutor should go to prison then 🤷🏼♂️😡
i mean there are probably quite a few prosecutors who should, on the basis that they've done worse shit than the people they prosecute.
Thank you for all that context!
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Helpful comment, thank you.
Exactly. The burden of proof wasn't on her. It was the Police investigators and the DA that were required to prove he was the correct person. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously bad evidence. There needs to be more accountability force law enforcement and prosecution that do shady things to get convictions. The biggest crime of all is that the REAL rapist never got charged and most likely went on to rape more people.
That's disgusting. Take away pensions, throw them in jail.
"Recognised her attacker" or "saw some random black dude"?
You missed the part where she was actually raped, and didn't even identify Broadwater as her attacker in the lineup, then the prosecutor lied to her to get her to pick Broadwater instead. It's entirely the police and the prosecutor here.
Already answered this so I’ll paste my reply: If you read the article you would know this: >Police arrested Broadwater, who was given the pseudonym Gregory Madison in Lucky, but Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker. >**Broadwater was nonetheless tried and convicted in 1982 after Sebold identified him as her rapist on the witness stand** and an expert said microscopic hair analysis had tied him to the crime. That type of analysis has since been deemed junk science by the US Department of Justice. She failed to identify him in a line up but the DA decided to proceed with a case against him anyway. She knew she failed to identify him in a line up but still chose to testify at his trial and say he was the one who raped her. I fully believe she was raped. I also fully believe she testified against a man without being 100% certain it was him and the jury convicted him because of it. She then made millions off of this story because she based “The Lovely Bones” on what happened to her as well as named him as her rapist in her memoirs. That is libel and she’s guilty of defamation- intentional or unintentional (I believe it to be unintentional) she should still have to pay him all of the money she made from it. It’s quite literally the absolute least she could do.
No amount of money is enough to repay that.
The state put him away with a shitty process it sounds like. She failed to identify him in a line up yet he was still put away for 16 years. Just a lazy ass system that apparently doesn't require due diligence. Makes no sense how little it takes to ruin an innocent person's life with our own legal system meant to protect us.
The other problem is, if she was really assaulted, then the real assailant was never subdued and probably raped many more who were too traumatized to report it. So an innocent man was jailed and the real criminal was free to continue assaulting other women. A real lose lose, but at least the prosecute was able to mark a win.
There's no reason to suspect she wasn't actually assaulted.
Feels like it shouldn't be the taxpayers burden but rather the accuser's, who wrongly testified against him for a crime he didn't commit. I get that she was truly assaulted, but she should've known that convicting an innocent man wouldn't have brought her justice. The system heavily relied on her testimony and she lied under oath, whether deliberate or not, she committed a crime. Edit: After further reading I found that Broadwater accepted Sebold's apology as she acknowledged the mistake made by her AND the justice system which ruined an innocent man's life, much like how the r*pe ruined her's. We can't know for sure what her intentions were as an 18 year old. But based on her apology it is safe to say she feels terrible for what happened. PS: I just want to bring to light the struggle the man went through. Thankfully, HBO is making a docu-series about him and this case. I encourage everyone to check it out when it comes out. Edit2: I want everyone to know that what I said isn't meant to discourage any victim of r*pe from stepping forward and reporting the incident. I still believe that women must be heard and we must believe victims of assault. The reason I asked for her to be held accountable is because of the discrepancies in her story which were found by the producer himself while reading "Lucky". Also, she claimed Broadwater was talking to her that day outside the restaurant, when he was actually speaking to someone else he recognized. This man was discharged from the Marines to care for his father (who had stomach cancer). His life changed when he was found guilty of this crime. He was sent to prison where he could have been killed. After his release, he chose to not have children because he was still a "registered sex offender". But it is hard for me to ignore two huge facts, 1. Broadwater had no role in her assault, 2. Sebold had a role, no matter how insignificant, in Broadwater's conviction.
According to the article, there was a bit of prosecutorial misconduct involved. The investigators apparently lied to the victim about the people she saw in a line-up (where she picked a different guy). They basically coached her to then pick the guy that ultimately went to jail.
This type of coaching is super common, unfortunately. It is helpful in convicting guilty and innocent people; ultimately this seems to become popular because jurries are often "dumb" and get easily confused.
My mom was once robbed of her purse, and was later called to the station to pick the guy out of a lineup. She admitted to the cops that she wasn’t sure, but made her best guess. The cops laughed and said “No one ever gets these right. The guy that actually robbed you was arrested in possession of your purse, and he was the one guy that you eliminated confidently”. It was a great experience in how unreliable witnesses can be, even when trying their best.
As we know from Reddit's most favourite video! "Don't Talk to the Police" by Regent University School of Law
It's shut the fuck up Friday and what do you do when the cops want to ask you questions?
Yep, the innocense files on netflix would make you worry about ever being accused.
Yeah it's crazy how cops will coach a witness to make certain statements simply because they have already put work into investigating that suspect. They don't want to have to start over the investigation with a new suspect.
evil
Imagine being so lazy that you just destroy an innocent person’s life because otherwise you’d have to do some more paperwork and find actual justice
The entire system is the problem. There is pressure from the top to find someone and build the best case against them. Even if they know they aren't guilty.
I don't think my heart can take that.
> Yep, the innocense files on netflix would make you worry about ever being accused. Existing in America was good enough for me to know I'd never put my trust in a jury of my "peers".
Dumb or no, I think the juries' larger problem is just trusting the wrong people. They presume the prosecutors know what they're doing and are working in the public interest.
God I hate that shit. Cops are allowed to lie to you and prosecutors will do this kind of “coaching” bullshit. And then when it comes out, they will never admit that they did anything wrong
For what it's worth, cops are absolutely not allowed to lie to victims to sway something like an identification. Of course it happens, but if it comes to light it would absolutely be used by defense to try and have an ID thrown out. I guess in theory if there was an uncooperative victim who was lying to the cops and they used a ruse to obtain information from them, that'd be one thing, but that's where the victim already has the info and is simply not disclosing it. For ID or the like, the science has meant there's generally a great deal of guidelines in departments to guard against improper influence on victims and witnesses, since otherwise a good defense attorney will stand a solid chance of getting it thrown out. Edit: typo
Just to hop onto your comment. A lot of this stuff is no longer allowed. This case is from 1981, where current police police procedures were a lot different. To do photo line ups and field line ups now, police have to read a form verbatim (of course some officers may not follow instructions) so that the instructions are as least suggestive as possible. For photo line ups, best practice requires a police officer who has no relation with the case to administer it. So that the officer who is administering the test themselves have no idea who the actual suspect is and can't influence the victim.
Well, if that's true, then I stand corrected. I feel bad for the woman as she was, once again, robbed of her agency. But I can't help but feel terribly bad for the gentleman who lost half his life just for being in the same neighborhood as her.
In cases like this, I always fear it's worse. This guy has his life destroyed, but what about the real rapist? It's unlikely he just stopped, so how many other women were raped because the real guy was allowed to walk free?
Yeah it’s just awful all around and especially awful for this innocent man…
I am going to miss Andre Braugher until the day I die. Damn he was excellent.
So the cops did it. That tracks
Sure. She still took the stand and identified him in front of the jury. She's not wholly free of any accountability here.
There is a difference between willingly accusing someone you know did not commit a crime, and accusing someone you think commited the crime. I remember a similar case décades ago, a woman raped in her home who positively identified her rapist, twice. The détective said she was the "perfect" victim: she did not take a shower, she carefully watched her rapist, etc. Two trials and she's still adamant. Then years later, an inmate brags to his cell companion that an innocent had been convicted for one of his rape. DNA testing later, the innocent guy was freed, the woman was mortified: thé two guys did not even look alike. The only way she thinks this happened is because it was a mainly White neighborhood, that the wrongly convicted guy came by sometimes and that her brains associated both men. It was a documentary about the weakness of human witness, btw Édit: French autocorrect mistake
I don't see any suggestion that she misidentified him willfully, so she's only accountable to herself. She should feel like a turd about it.
I don't think they're saying she's free of it. Just how the system is accountable as well.
There’s got to be something fundamentally wrong with the system in place for so many instances of this happening
Sadly, eyewitness testimony is very unreliable but also very persuasive.
No... you'd think, but you should look into witness misidentification research and stats. It's really alarming how terrible people are at recognizing random people. It really shouldn't be given the weight it is. Had she said "my friend, Zeus, did it", that's different and on her. But reading the details here, that should not have been enough to convict him. Enough to investigate him, sure, but it reads like they didn't have enough evidence yet locked him up anyways.
It seems that she genuinely believed it was him, and was simply mistaken. Trauma is weird and can do that. To me, it *does* seem appropriate to hold the system accountable for this. Convicting on victim testimony is not "beyond all reasonable doubt," even if the victim sincerely believes it. There should have been some evidentiary expectation.
Yeah a major issue is reliance on witnesses given how easily we misremember what happened and missremember what a person looked like, was wearing, and so on
>Feels like it shouldn't be the taxpayers burden This system failed him so it should be the system paying. The system imprisoned him without enough evidence there should have been something else other than her testimony of meeting a random man on the street, it's the system's fault.
It's not lying under oath if she honestly thought he was the rapist. She wasn't thinking that she was convicting an innocent man either. Do you really think she was just maliciously trying to lock up some random innocent man who vaguely matched her memory of her attacker? I guess in an ideal world the jury would be aware of the (un)reliability of people's memory in situations like this and wouldn't convict based on her identification alone. Shifting the blame to witnesses and victims who are found to have misremembered things sounds like a good way to make everyone fearful of going to court. We know there are a lot of actual rape cases that get dropped or where the defendant is found not guilty where the defendant did actually do it. It's just very hard to prove a lot of the time. If those women who accused someone who is 'not guilty' are at risk of being fined for it, it's going to prevent a lot of people ever coming forward.
People are going to testify to the best of their ability, but we know witness testimony is a horribly bad chance of actually picking correct people out of a line, so at best it's a piece of the puzzle. It's up to the prosecutor to form a justified and decent case against the accused. On the other hand you can definitely counter sue if it's possible to prove the accuser has made false testimony on purpose.
She didn't convict him and lock him up, the state did. I doubt she would have gone through with all that if she wasn't sure in her mind he was the one who did it, it is the fault of the court for convicting the man without sufficient evidence.
I agree we, taxpayers, foot the bill for a lot of shit we shouldn't have to pay for. Billing people who gave what they believed to be true testimony would be an incredibly dangerous precedent, however.
The accuser won't have any money to pay the falsely convicted person in most cases, certainly not $5.5m. It is also the state that convicted him and imprisoned him. It's a failure of the justice system, who the accuser is and what motivated them isn't really all that important, it's the state's fault.
Only 5.5 million??!?
I remember seeing this on the Registry of Exonerations. He didn't just spend 16 years in prison, he spent more than that outside it as a registered sex offender, living under harsh restrictions for something he didn't do.
That tracks better with his age considering she's accusing someone of having attacked her on a college campus you would presume it's someone around college age
I think she was attacked a while ago but was in college at the time. So he may have been college age at the time of the attck.
And he was only convicted based on the writer testimony? No ADN tests, injuries, other witness, etc? It seems she basically just chose a random guy to point the finger at.
Hair science, which has since been discarded as junk science and is the factor in a lot of exonerations. Otherwise, as far I as recall, just regular misidentification, which is another common factor in exonerations.
Cross-race misidentification is even more common.
Well he was black also, I’m sure that sealed his fate with some jurors.
apparently the police/prosecutor chose the guy and coached her into saying it was him? at least that seems to be the prevailing opinion in this thread, anyway.
How tf can anybody be imprisoned for 16 years based on a single eye witness testimony in the first place? The legal system shouldn’t even be setup to allow that regardless of false accusations.
He was denied parole five times because he refused to say he did it. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/24/us/anthony-broadwater-alice-sebold-rape-exoneration/index.html
It's so fucked up how our "justice" system dangles freedom in exchange for false confessions.
Yeah, it's fucking horrifying. The west Memphis three got hit with the same shit. In order to get out they had to agree that the state, which railroaded them in an outrageously corrupt manner, had done nothing wrong in convicting them. One of them said he only took the deal because he didn't believe one of the others would survive another year or two in prison while waiting for further appeals
lock worthless wakeful angle paint nail unique cagey enjoy unwritten *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
A single eye witness. Who failed to identify him in a police lineup.... WTF were his lawyers doing....
Being appointed to him and paid minimum public defender salaries
WTF was the fucking prosecutor doing? This never should have gone anywhere in the first place.
Black
Surprised that people in the comments section are baffled that he got convicted. He was a Black man accused of raping a white woman, he already had one foot in the grave. But his lawyers really fucked up though,
In New York... in the 80s... it literally gets worse and worse for him with more and more context.
Man
That man could have died in jail for this
I mean not to be too poetic, but he probably did. I can't imagine what this poor tortured soul must have gone through. This is such a scary story, a rapist got away with it and an innocent man went to prison for a long long time. Awful everything
5.5m would be accepted if it was for each year of the sentence, but to be just 5.5m of a bloody settlement for the scummy city ruining his life forever? Hell no.
5.5 is just under $*3*0/hr for 16 years, with 1.5x overtime after 40hr/wk but he got *no* time off whatsoever. he had *no* life of his own for that *entire* time. the sacrifice of that is immeasurable.
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Witnesses are notoriously bad at remembering anything. Even four or more witnesses all “saw”/“heard” the same thing in other cases only to be proved wrong with DNA or video evidence. I’m not saying witnesses are always wrong, but if witnesses testimony is the foundation for a crime then it is not beyond a reasonable doubt. The exception would be co-conspirator or accomplice.
Memory is in general flawed. If you push people hard enough, you can alter how they remember that memory.
This is why I don't believe in the death penalty.
And the rapist Brock Turner only got 6 months…
doesn’t he go by Allen Turner now?
yes, Rapist Allen Turner aka Rapist Brock Allen Turner, that Rapist.
Kind of a bold move to only change your first name... rapist loser piece of trash.
3 months actually >On September 2, 2016, Turner was released after serving three months, which was half of his sentence, for good behavior.
3 months for rape is mind boggling. 10+ years is necessary.
Well this man got 16 years despite being innocent. I wonder what the difference is between him and Turner...
One was poor another was rich?
That and one was a white kid and the other was a black man
I’ve been telling people that Brock Allan Turner the rapist was in jail for more time than he was! I’ll make a note of the shameful sentence Brock Allan Turner the rapist served
That’s so messed up.
The RAPIST Brock Turner is also NOT a p.o.c... js
How did she accuse a black man when the one who committed the crime was white? If he was masked, how could she just say it was him? This is so infuriating.
She didn't accuse him, she just said that she saw her attacker in that area, when she was supposed to identify her attacker she pointed out someone else, but the cops pressured her into choosing him
BuT bUt... He'S a GoOd sWiMmEr !!
This seems like obvious felony charges for the prosecutors. Falsifying evidence, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, false charges, intimidation, even rising to the level of criminal conspiracy since they are working with other police to cover up, create, and manipulate a crime. Aggravating factor that someone is doing this under color of law from a position of authority, so sentences would be further increased. This is one of the highest levels of injustice that can happen in a system short of physical violence being used.
That rapist ruined two peoples lives.
It happens way more often than you would think. “It” being wrongful convictions. There’s nonprofits, like The Innocence Project, working to fix this, but unfortunately, a lot of people just want to put someone in jail and stop thinking about it.
Huge reason against the death sentence.
And these castrations people have been talking about
Sex Crimes are disgusting, but if anyone really thinks it's about genitals and sex they're wildly ignorant of the realities; it's about power and chopping parts off won't change that even if you have the right guy.
Yep; I can't believe people find it acceptable to make such decisions that can never be undone, when the chance of it being a false conviction is absolutely non-negliable. How do people have such sheer lack of empathy, self-awareness, and/or conscience?
They are just fucking stupid. They genuinely believe the system would never fail and/or be abused in any way. It isn't even a question of empathy here. I myself believe some people should be straight up killed but the government is the last thing you should trust with that kind of power. How someone can lack critical thinking skills to understand something so simple is beyond me....
Biggest reason why I'll never vote for a "tough on crime" candidate. I'm not even sure there's evidence they do any better job at catching actual criminals, and they cause such harm to innocent people when cops/prosecutors are more concerned with arrest/conviction rates than with getting it right.
That's basically what the show 'Rectify' was about, although it focused mostly on the main character's difficulty reintegrating into society.
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There was "physical evidence" it was just before DNA evidence, so they were using some kind of hair analysis that was subsequently proved to not actually be science.
16 years in prison? Wow if only actual rapers had such sentence.
The system failed to protect an 18-year old girl and put the wrong young black man in jail for it for 16 years. Arrest the system.
Prosecutors and judges should have annual ethics reviews with REAL consequences, ie they go to prison.
And thats why Eyewitnesses arent a valid source of proof
“Timothy U.S.A.”
There are so many institutional failings here that the state should pay out. There is also a huge civil suit that should be explored to the fullest extent.
You can't un-fuck that man's life. No amount of money can fix that.
The Justice system in the USA is scary. Gotta fill those prisons up eh? Sickening. To know you can just be arrested, get an unfair trial and spend your life in fucking jail. Horrifying.
It wasn’t a false accusation, it was a false identification. Alice Sebold was absolutely raped, but the cops pushed her to ID a suspect they had already identified, who is the man this video describes. This is a failure of policing
Didn't she see and accuse him while walking down a street?
She said she saw her rapist, then went to the police. The police brought in a bunch of guys for a lineup and she did not identify Broadwater as the guy. How he still ended up being found guilty, i have no idea.
Everything I read about this gets even worse than the last thing. Let me get this straight she; - Was raped by a man - Happened to walk into a man she believes was her rapist (or very much looked like him) - Police bring in a bunch of men and she identified one - But they still picked a different man than the one she identified So It's completely possible that there were four completely different men in this story, the rapist, the man she walked into on the street, the man she identified in a lineup, and then Broadwater. That's fucking craaaazy.
It wasn’t a false accusation. She absolutely was raped but misidentified her attacker. The rest was a miscarriage of justice. She didn’t choose him in the lineup (the prosecutor lied and told her he’d intentionally got a plant to stand who looked similar to confuse her), the cops had done nothing when she first reported it so they were now saving face, sounds like his lawyer was an imbecile as no witnesses were called. Huge miscarriage of justice with 2 young kids caught in the middle.
"At the [police lineup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_lineup), which included Broadwater, Sebold had identified a different person as her rapist. When police told her she had identified someone other than Broadwater, she said the two men looked "almost identical".[^(\[17\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sebold#cite_note-AP-17) Defense attorneys arguing for Broadwater's exoneration asserted that, after the lineup, the prosecutor lied to Sebold, telling her that the man she had identified and Broadwater were friends, and that they both came to the lineup to confuse her.[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sebold#cite_note-:1-8) They also stated that Sebold wrote in *Lucky* that the prosecutor coached her into changing her identification.[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sebold#cite_note-:2-9) In 2021, Broadwater's new attorneys argued that this influenced Sebold's testimony"
And the real rapist is still out there presumably doing rapist things
i wonder why Brock Turner got 6 months with concrete evidence and literally being caught in the act and constrained until the police showed up, but this guy got 16 years with one eyewitness claim
The judge and whoever was involved should be convicted to 16 years in jail as well
This is Mark Wahlberg's fault somehow
Ok soooo she needs to pay him & go to jail. Bye
This man deserves way more than 5.5 million. 16 years of your life that you can never get back and all you're given as 'compensation' is 5.5 million? This is unacceptable and the accuser should be put in prison for the same amount of time as him so she can feel what he had to go through.
Meanwhile, a man convicted of 34 felonies HE DEFINITELY committed, and that isn’t even his multiple sexual harassment allegations or the betrayal of an entire nation IS STILL being considered for the position of leader of the free world… Murica!
This is why the death penalty is a bad idea
I get that she picked the wrong guy but the fact that the justice system didn't have enough proof to convict him is unforgiveable. Guilty men have gotten off with more damning evidence
Did she believe he was her rapiest? If so then I’d say it is the states fault and not hers. She was rapped she just had the wrong person. The burden of proof is on the state.
Is 40 dollars an hour to spend 16 years in prison as a labeled sex offender worth the incredible injustice caused by this? I don’t think so. Someone should be held accountable whether that is the people working the case or the person purposely misidentifying someone.
Police have one job and that is to close cases. Thats how their performance is judged. Whether they do so accurately does not matter at all. In this case it resulted in a conviction. That would go in their book as a win! This happens every day in America. But what are you gonna do about it? No one cares until it happens to them. And then, its too late.
She ruined that man’s life and should absolutely be thrown in jail
no, the state did. Her testimony should never have been enough. And she literally pointed out the wrong person on a line up. She was actually raped by someone and that trauma caused her to think he was the person that did it.
It sounds like she was actually raped and then falsely identified him, which is still fucked but much less cut and dry than that.
Other comments are saying that she identified someone else on the police lineup and was pressured to change by the police
from what I've read about this, it wasn't a matter of false accusation - it was a matter of the cops convincing her he was the rapist. As usual, they pick someone to be the "criminal" and work backwards to get a conviction. And, face it, at 18, no doubt she was easily convinced by the cops. They keep at you until you doubt your own memory, wearing you down, until you just give in and do what they want.. She comes in, a rape victim, already a mess from the crime itself, and the cops go to work on her, to get her to ID a person so they can close the case. The fact they had no other evidence, says that fact very loudly. Plus, the fact the parole boards kept him in jail because he would not admit to a crime he did not commit, says a lot of bad about the board. Like the cops, all they wanted was to punish somebody. So I would not blame her. Heck, I think she should sue the cops, too..
Misleading headline. It wasn’t a false accusation by the victim. The police picked him as the suspect, ran him in front of the victim and she did not pick him, and he still got convicted. This is police misconduct and prosecutorial error. Not a false accusation by the victim.
This story is fucking tragic all around. Firstly, this man went to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Secondly, the actual rapist got away with it. And I just want to add, for anyone hating on the rape victim, it wasn't her job to gather evidence and prove this man was her rapist, it was the Police investigators and the district attorneys office that had that job. Both the police and the DA both let down the victim and society at large.
People should read about this instead of a chopped up reel. More like police and prosecutor needed to get stars up. https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-syracuse-william-fitzpatrick-alice-sebold-2cb1b731f915d7d44bf14728a791bc61
So they train newscasters to speak in that weird stilted cadence where every sentence is a rhetorical question?
Bless this man, may he have an enjoyable life!
‘Yup, that’s him’ should not be enough to convict someone.
Agreed. Which is why he’s suing the state
I routinely have to remind people that we have a legal system, not a “justice” system. The number one priority of our legal system is to protect itself from scrutiny. Justice can be an outcome, but it’s never assured. Anyone who pretends that our legal system is a justice system, is a charlatan.