Submitted by OutsideObserver2 t3_1241qxq in news
Landeyda t1_jdyld8z wrote
Reply to comment by PurpleAntifreeze in N.Y. to pay $5.5 million to man exonerated in writer Alice Sebold rape case by OutsideObserver2
Because she ID'ed him and testified to it. That's being left out.
> “Is there any doubt in your mind, Miss Sebold, that the person that you saw on Marshall Street is the person who attacked you on May 8 in Thornden Park?” the prosecutor asked. > > “No doubt whatsoever.”
Blame goes to the State for all its bullshit, but she, on the stand, said that Broadwater was the one to do it under oath.
ddottay t1_jdyokzv wrote
She also picked someone else in the police lineup and then when she was told she picked the “wrong person” she changed her identification.
stolenfires t1_jdyugsw wrote
That's so fucked up. That could have been the actual rapist; who walked free and probably raped more women. It's victims all the way down.
LazyQuest t1_jdzcoa7 wrote
That's not how line ups work lol, the other people in it are not suspects
bros402 t1_jdymblk wrote
cops do shit all the time to implant false memories
woundedbearhair t1_jdyn1ra wrote
And speaking of discredited techniques, witness IDs are the least reliable method of identifying a suspect unless the suspect confessed to them and it’s marred by the trauma the witness is dealing with from the event. Cops manipulate witnesses all the time to arrive at the conclusion they are aiming for.
jollybumpkin t1_jdytjje wrote
> she, on the stand, said that Broadwater was the one to do it under oath.
That's a terrible mistake she will have to live with for the rest of her life. She clearly regrets it.
She was very young and traumatized by an awful sexual assault. You'd have to read Lucky to understand how bad it was.
I'm not trying to defend her or excuse her mistake. I'm not ready to condemn her, either. Life is hard. Life is complicated.
DigitalSteven1 t1_jdyz7if wrote
I wouldn't call that a mistake... More like lying under oath and putting an innocent man behind bars.
​
Of course, the entire situation is fucked, and all points back to the corruption in the justice system. Coercing a rape victim to identify an innocent is super fucked. The real people that should be behind bars are the ones that practically forced her to do that.
jollybumpkin t1_jdz00y1 wrote
Now you're just being antagonistic.
When she testified, she had the mistaken belief that he was the perpetrator. Was this foolish? Perhaps. Was she mixed up? Yes, probably. Was it racism? Probably not. There was never much doubt that the perpetrator was black. It just wasn't Broadwater.
But there's no reason to believe she testified maliciously. If that were true, she wouldn't have publicly apologized, recently.
When she wrote her book about the assault, Broadwater was already tried, convicted and locked up. She used a pseudonym for Broadwater, but she repeatedly wrote about the guy who was caught and prosecuted. She wrote he was the one who did it. She seems to have believed it, until, much later, she better understood what had happened and how the police improperly influenced her testimony.
Lucky did not sell well. After she published Lovely Bones, the public got interested in her previous book, Lucky, and started to buy it. By then, Broadwater had been locked up for years.
global_scamartist t1_jdz4o88 wrote
And lucky was about to be made into a Netflix movie which got cancelled when the original producer did his own research and hired a private investigator to look into the case. That’s how broadwater got exonerated.
The producer is now making a movie called unlucky about how that process went.
“The new film will be titled Unlucky, and is being produced by Timothy Mucciante — who, during his previous tenure as an executive producer on a film adaptation of Lucky, found inconsistencies in Sebold's account that eventually led to Broadwater's exoneration.
In the op-ed, Mucciante detailed that one of the things that made him start to question the case was Sebold's own account of comments made to her by an assistant district attorney after she initially identified a man other than Broadwater in the police lineup (later, in the trial, she did identify Broadwater as her rapist, which together with a now-discredited junk science known as "microscopic hair analysis" secured his conviction). He said that a script rewrite that changed the race of Sebold's assailant in the film to a white man (Broadwater is Black) also led to keeping his ‘unease with aspects of the book fresh in mind.’”
So basically she changed her account from identifying broadwater and was potentially ok with the script changing the assailant to a white man. If it was for a sale to Netflix then it’s at the least, still disingenuous and shady. At the worst it’s selling her trauma to wrongfully accuse a man for decades and trying to do it until Mucciante caught on. This is all publicly available information. I’m not the source - it’s available everywhere.
QuintoBlanco t1_je4wqu3 wrote
>There was never much doubt that the perpetrator was black. It just wasn't Broadwater.
Well, there is the problem.
Broadwater only became a suspect because Alice Sebold falsely accused him.
The only reason the police was convinced Broadwater was the rapist, was that Sebold initially was sure he was the man who raped her.
She was raped by a black man, and accused another black man.
I just want to make it clear that she did not accuse Broadwater after the police had arrested him, or pointed him out to Sebold.
She accused a black man she had met on the street.
humanregularbeing t1_je3x9pt wrote
Don't know anything about this case, am only passing through. But "was it racism probably not there was never much doubt that the perpetrator was black it just wasn't Broadwater" is a bit messed up. Just reread it.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments