March 28th 2023.
Redemption has come in the form of several million dollars for a man
imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. According to The New York Post, a man who spent 16 years in jail after being wrongfully convicted of raping writer Alice Sebold in 1981 has settled a lawsuit with New York State. Anthony Broadwater, now 62, will receive $5.5 million after settling the decades-old case against New York.
Broadwater's conviction for assaulting Sebold was annulled in 2021. The State of New York consented to compensate Broadwater after he was absolved of the rape of the award-winning novelist, who was attending Syracuse University in 1981. The wrongly convicted Broadwater sued the state for damages after having his conviction nullified by a judge in November 2021.
That was nearly 22 years after he was released from prison in 1999.
Broadwater's lawyer, Melissa Swartz, talked to The New York Post Monday and said that all that is needed is the signature from Judge Ramon Rivera. Swartz anticipates Rivera will sign the paperwork to finalize the agreement between both parties.
“Tony is grateful to the state of New York for quickly resolving this matter,” Swartz said.
“I appreciate what Attorney General [Letitia] James has done and I hope and pray that others in my situation can receive the same degree of justice,” Broadwater said in a statement through a lawyer. “We all suffer from destroyed lives.”
Sebold, who was a freshman at Syracuse University when the incident took place, told police that Broadwater reminded her of her aggressor after seeing him in the street five months after she was attacked, Complex reported. She later failed to point him out in a lineup but testified in court that he was the man who had forced himself on her.
Sebold apologized late last year in a statement posted on Medium, Sebold said as a “traumatized 18-year-old rape victim” she put her faith in the legal system and her goal wasn’t to ruin a young innocent man’s life.
“My goal in 1982 was justice–not to perpetuate injustice and certainly not to forever, and irreparably, change a young man’s life by the very crime that had changed mine,” Sebold wrote. “I am thankful that Mr. Broadwater has finally been vindicated, but the fact remains that 40 years ago, he became another young Black man brutalized by our faulty legal system. I will always be sorry for what was done to him.”
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