The Lovely Bones author, Alice Sebold has issued an apology to Mr Broadwater. Should she do more?
Apparently, Ms Sebold identified Mr Broadwater as her rapist after spotting him at random on a street months after the crime. She later identified another man in a police lineup. Normally, that would be the end of it, but the prosecutor refused to let it go, and convinced Sebold that Broadwater was the rapist.
Broadwater had no prior adult criminal record.
Broadwater’s lawyers intend to pursue restitution from the state of New York, but not against Ms Sebold.
Well. If I had caused an innocent man to go to prison for 16 years, and I was a famous writer, I know to whom my most famous book’s royalties would be going to. That’s the only way I could live with myself.
ISTM that the only one who could truly know this is Sebold herself. Did she have doubts? Did she express those doubts? Was she pressured, and if so, how and to what extent?
The answer to this question depends on complex facts, many of which are not clear from this article.
First of all, is there complete certainty that he is innocent? I’m not suggesting otherwise, I’m just not sure what happened here. I can see that the evidence was insufficient to convict him and that there was prosecutorial misconduct, so he should not have been convicted. But that’s not the same thing as certainty that he’s innocent - the DNA evidence was destroyed in 1989. The article is hopeless incomplete in this regard, here’s the paragraph from which we are supposed to conclude that he is certainly innocent:
Justice arrived like a meteor, originating from an unlikely source: Timothy Mucciante, who nursed grave doubts about the veracity of Sebold’s story when he was the executive producer of the film version of “Lucky.” He suspected that the man called “Gregory Madison” in the book might not be the actual perpetrator, and in late June hired private investigator Dan Myers to look into the matter. “After a conversation of over an hour with Anthony Broadwater, I knew this guy was innocent,” says Myers, a 20-year police veteran.
So why was Broadwater so sure he was innocent?
Second, it’s not at all clear to me exactly what Ms Sebold did. She obviously had a responsibility to be completely honest in her evidence. But it’s not really her responsibility if a flawed system places undue weight on notoriously unreliable eyewitness testimony. If she was manipulated by a prosecutor, it’s hard to know exactly what culpability she has without knowing exacly what happened. And I’m not too clear about this book. Did she outright lie in the book? Or did she exaggerate what was known with any certainty?
She said it was Broadwater based on seeing him in the street 5 months after the assault. Then she identified someone who was not Broadwater in a lineup in which Broadwater was present. Then she identified Broadwater as the guy in court.
The only other evidence against him was DNA that was junk science and is since discredited.
You’re talking about the rape victim here. If she genuinely believed he did it, then she didn’t anything wrong. It’s the court who screwed up with bad evidence and such.
That doesn’t mean she was wrong to apologize. I just got through saying why apologizing is not a contest about who is right and who is wrong. But, unless she actually did something wrong, she doesn’t “owe” him anything.
The courts may, however, which is why you can sue for this sort of thing.
“Genuine belief” is more of a spectrum than a specific point. To get a conviction based on a positive visual ID, you really need to testify that you are really very confident that you’re not mistaken. No reasonable doubt. Like, I genuinely believe that I’m gonna work out later today. But I wouldn’t put anybody’s life on it.
Given that she identified a different guy when he was standing right next to Broadwater, it seems at least possible that she might have then misstated her level of “genuine belief” in order to get a jury to convict, and she would have known she was doing so. I’m sure that if she did so, she did so at the direction of a DA who was a piece of shit. But still. It is a real moral dilemma to be sort of sure that the defendant is the man who assaulted you, and testify “I am very sure,” which based on the available facts seems reasonably likely to have happened.
It’s widely known today that eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. If I were called as an eyewitness to something, I’d flat out refuse to submit to pressure from a prosecutor to express complete certainty. But that is based on my knowledge of objective research on the matter. Just like all the people who flat out will not believe that there is no alternate ending to Big, I experience the same subjective illusion of certainty about my memories.
So even today I would not hold the average witness to this same expectation. It’s down to the legal system to ensure that undue weight is not placed on eyewitness testimony. And this was in 1982. Unless she was really dishonest and knowingly exaggerated her testimony based on unwarranted assurances from the prosecutor that “we’ve definitely got the right guy”, then it’s hard to see her as significantly culpable.
I don’t know what significant culpability really would be here, so I don’t disagree, really. There’s no reason to believe she woke up one day and decided railroading somebody was a good thing.
I am less sure than you that in 1982 people didn’t have a general moral understanding that if you weren’t sure if it was #4 or #5 a few weeks ago, that is relevant to how sure you are today that it was #4. Obviously I don’t have a transcript or anything in front of me, but they convicted, so she must have said she was pretty dang sure, right? And it seems like she shouldn’t have been? And a criminal court is not a place where these kinds of things go unexamined.
As to whether she has a moral obligation to donate profits from her subsequent books and movie to the guy - I’d say that depends on whether we have certainty that he’s innocent, rather than just certainty that he should not have been convicted.
Maybe a donation to the Innocence Project would be one way to go.
Slate had an excellent article about this. Sebold wrote a memoir, Lucky, about her rape and “bringing the attacker to justice,” and the Slate article looks at how the memoir reads very differently now.
Sebold was treated like absolute shit throughout the experience, from her parents to doctors to the criminal justice system. Her parents didn’t want to deal with hearing about her experience, so they sent her to a psychiatrist who told her “well, I guess this will make you less inhibited about sex now, huh?”
I can absolutely believe that she convinced herself that he was her attacker: the police and prosecutor pushed this hard, telling her multiple lies to prove his guilt. I agree with the Slate author:
As I reread this memoir now, the narrator of Lucky transforms from a brave survivor summoning the will to bring her rapist to justice into an isolated, psychologically damaged girl making a desperate but delusional bid to regain her life. Sebold committed a terrible wrong in identifying Broadwater as her attacker, but it’s not the responsibility of a traumatized rape victim to fairly investigate and prosecute the person who assaulted her. That is the duty of the police and prosecutors, who failed both Sebold and Broadwater at every stage, from the moment she first reported the crime to the moment he was convicted.
The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
She has no responsibility to donate her profits to him. The criminal justice system failed them both and should be held responsible. She is still a victim.
But I don’t understand this “certainty that he’s innocent” bit. There really is zero evidence that he was the rapist. The burden of proof doesn’t fall on him.
But the composite sketch done after the rape didn’t resemble Broadwater, she picked the wrong man in a lineup, Broadwater had recently returned to town after serving in the marines, he had no criminal record, and he hasn’t “reoffended” since his release in 1998.
And all this evidence against his conviction should really be unnecessary. There is no reliable evidence that he was the rapist. I don’t understand this “but maybe he’s still guilty” idea.
That account is truly horrible. So after all this, she’s left with the knowledge that the rapist was never caught, and the inevitable guilt (even though she was not at fault) that she helped put an innocent man in prison.
The fact that Broadwater is going after the state of NY but not Sebold supports the narrative in the Slate article. If Broadwater himself doesn’t think she’s at fault, perhaps people who are critical of her should think twice.
