"First, I want to say that I am truly sorry to Anthony Broadwater and I deeply regret what you have been through," Sebold, the author of "The Lovely Bones," wrote in a statement posted on Medium.com.

Broadwater, who has always maintained his innocence, was convicted of the rape in 1982 and spent 16 years in prison.

The Onondaga County district attorney joined in the motion to vacate the conviction.

Broadwater was convicted on two pieces of evidence -- Sebold's account and a cross-racial identification -- the author is White and Broadwater is Black -- and the analysis of a piece of hair that was later determined to be faulty, his attorneys wrote.

In "Lucky," Sebold wrote that after she failed to identify Broadwater in a police lineup, "a detective and a prosecutor told her after the lineup that she picked out the wrong man and how the prosecutor deliberately coached her into rehabilitating her misidentification," according to the attorneys' affirmation that led to Broadwater's exoneration.

The unreliability of the hair analysis and the conversation between the prosecutor and Sebold after the lineup would probably have led to a different verdict if it had been presented at trial, the attorneys said.

"I am grateful that Mr.

Broadwater's unfair conviction for which he has served not only 16 years behind bars but in ways that further serve to wound and stigmatize, nearly a full life sentence," Sebold wrote.

After his exoneration, Broadwater said that he would like an apology from the author, but also acknowledged what she had suffered.

"I sympathize with her, what happened to her," he said.