The man who was convicted of raping The Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold has been exonerated after 40 years.
As reported by the Associated Press, Anthony Broadwater, who was incarcerated for 16 years after being found guilty of a crime he did not commit, had his conviction overturned by a judge on Monday, November 22.
The decision came after significant flaws in Broadwater's 1982 prosecution were scrutinized more closely.
Sebold, 58, had shared a harrowing account of the night she was raped when she was an 18-year-old student at Syracuse University in her 1999 memoir, Lucky.
But a producer working on a film adaptation of the 21-year-old book had noticed inconsistencies in the resulting trial and began doing his own research.
In the book, Sebold goes into detail about the assault, explaining that she was raped by a Black man in a tunnel back in May 1981.
Months later, she came across a man in the street that she was sure was the person who raped her.
"He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street," Sebold wrote in her book. "'Hey, girl,' he said. 'Don’t I know you from somewhere?'"
She didn't speak to the man, recalling how she "looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel."
Sebold went to the police but she didn't know the man's name and authorities had failed to locate him.
One officer suggested the man in the street could have been Broadwater, who had purportedly been seen nearby.
When Broadwater was arrested, Sebold did not identify him in a police lineup, and chose a different man as "the expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me."
Despite this, Broadwater was ultimately convicted in 1982 for two main reasons.
The first was that Sebold would later identify him as her rapist in court. And "evidence" in the form of microscopic hair analysis had linked Broadwater to the assault. This type of evidence has in recent years been branded "junk science" by the U.S. Department of Justice.
After his 16 years behind bars, Broadwater remained on New York's sex offender registry.
He later married but insisted on not having children due to the "stigma" of his conviction.
"We had a big argument sometimes about kids, and I told her I could never, ever allow kids to come into this world with a stigma on my back," he said, per AP.
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