Conviction overturned in rape of 'Lovely Bones' author 40 years later

https://www.aol.com/news/conviction-overturned-rape-lovely-bones-235926266.html

Anthony Broadwater, 61, was cleared on Monday by New York Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy of charges that he assaulted Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, when she was an 18-year-old first-year student at Syracuse University in 1981. She had identified someone else in the police lineup. When the police pressured her to pick a similar-looking black man, she went along with them. That man spent 16 years in prison and had been on New York’s sex offender registry since his release in 1999.

Alice Sebold, now 58, wrote about the attack in her 1999 memoir, “Lucky.” Scrutiny of the case against Broadwater increased after “Lucky” was picked up in 2019 for a Netflix film. Executive producer Tim Mucciante began questioning the conviction as he pored over the script and Sebold’s memoir. He eventually dropped the project and hired a private detective in an investigation. It ended up in the office of Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, who called the man's conviction an injustice.