Alice Sebold, Anthony Broadwater and a terrible miscarriage of justice

There are few more terrible fates than to be condemned and imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit; but to have borne witness in a trial that led to a man being unjustly punished must be terrible too.

The writer Alice Sebold has apologised for the wrongful imprisonment of Anthony Broadwater. He was convicted based on Sebold’s evidence, and other testimony, for her rape in 1981 when she was a student. There is no doubt that she was raped and beaten; it was, as she wrote in her best-selling memoir, Lucky, a trauma that shaped her life. But there is also now no doubt that it was her identification of Broadwater on the witness stand, as well as flawed forensic evidence based on microscopic hair analysis, that contributed to his conviction.

Some months after the attack, she identified a man in the neighbourhood that she thought might have been her attacker.