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He spent years in prison for the rape of author Alice Sebold, the subject of her memoir, 'Lucky.' A judge just exonerated him - CNN
Nov 25, 2021 1 min, 32 secs
It was published in 1999, the year after Broadwater's release from prison.

Almost five months after she was raped, Sebold saw Broadwater on the street in Syracuse.

He reminded her of the rapist, and she reported the encounter to police, according to Broadwater's attorneys' affirmation.

Broadwater was convicted on two pieces of evidence -- Sebold's account -- a cross-racial identification, since 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.

"Research has found that the risk of eyewitness misidentification is significantly increased when the witness and the subject are of different races," the affirmation stated.

As to the hair analysis, in 2015, "the FBI testified that microscopic hair analysis contained errors in at least 90 percent of the cases the agency reviewed," according to the attorneys' news release.

"We know now that the testimony of the forensic chemist stemmed from a largely debunked forensic approach to hair microscopy," the affirmation stated.

In "Lucky," Sebold wrote that "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 affirmation.

CNN has reached out to Sebold and her publishing company multiple times for comment.

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.

And now, we're past days, we can't have children," Broadwater told reporters after the court hearing.

The couple met in 1999, about a year after he was released from prison, he told CNN.

I'm so happy."

As to Sebold, Broadwater said he would like an apology.

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

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