The upstate NY city of Syracuse appears at odds with itself in the case of a infamous miscarriage of justice. Almost 5 years in the past, the district legal professional of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in courtroom and excoriated his county’s resolution a long time earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of writer Alice Sebold. With the DA’s help, the conviction was thrown out. Right now, the identical county authorities and that of its important metropolis, Syracuse, proceed to struggle a lawsuit filed by Broadwater that seeks monetary damages for the years he misplaced behind bars.
The conflicts, it appears, aren’t merely between prison authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the unique prosecution. A key knowledgeable for town and county appears to be experiencing an inside battle of his personal — or, at minimal, a dramatic change in opinion.
Syracuse’s paid knowledgeable, a veteran Tempo College regulation professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report within the civil go well with in December 2025 asserting that town’s prosecutors “didn’t have interaction in misconduct” within the Broadwater case. However a little bit over a yr earlier than that, Gershman advised me that prosecutors had “manufactured a case” in opposition to Broadwater, calling it “essentially the most heinous type of prosecutorial misconduct — when the prosecutor is creating guilt.” He went on to say, “‘Misconduct’ is type of glib on this case. … It’s a lot worse than plain misconduct. That is tyranny.”
In an interview for this text, Gershman stated he modified his thoughts after delving deeper into the case. “The details,” he stated, are extra “complicated” and “nuanced” than how he initially understood them.
Attorneys on either side of the Broadwater litigation declined to remark for this text.
Definitely, legal professionals retain paid specialists of each stripe for all types of actions. But it surely’s uncommon to see an knowledgeable take a place in courtroom after expressing a distinct one to a reporter. “It’s not unethical to vary your thoughts,” stated Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor and ethics knowledgeable at New York College College of Regulation. However, he added, Gershman’s reversal is “a humiliation and it’s going to undermine his credibility going ahead.” A possible jury within the case would possibly marvel what he really believes.
Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Regulation College, who focuses on prison regulation and ethics, provided an analogous view. She known as it “odd” that Gershman would “be prepared to provide such a strongly worded remark after which take a place as an knowledgeable on behalf of one of many events. That in itself is problematic. It raises considerations.” She stated she views the function of being a commentator for a information story as completely different from being an knowledgeable in a authorized case. Commentators ought to strategy the duty from a place to begin of neutrality, she stated. Being an knowledgeable, in contrast, has an inherently partisan side. “I believe it will get confused if you happen to do each,” Roiphe stated.
ProPublica lately printed an in-depth narrative investigation of the unique prison case that examined a number of lapses within the prosecution of Broadwater and uncovered a broader failure within the prison justice system in Syracuse on the time, which allowed a number of serial rapists to proceed their assaults — lots of which bore similarities to the one which Broadwater had been convicted of — for years.
The unique case dates again to the early hours of Could 8, 1981, when Sebold, then a Syracuse College freshman, was brutally raped in a park close to campus. Initially, the police didn’t consider her, although a medical examination and bodily proof supported her account. 5 months later, Sebold noticed Broadwater on a busy avenue and believed him to be her rapist. She reported the sighting to police, and Broadwater was arrested.
From the start, the case hinged on Sebold’s testimony. However at a lineup, she recognized a person apart from Broadwater as her rapist. What occurred proper after that misindentification is on the coronary heart of the present litigation.
Within the view of the present DA, Fitzpatrick, the prosecution ought to have halted the second Sebold picked any person else: “You already know, she didn’t pick the flawed man. She picked out the man,” Fitzpatrick advised me for the sooner article. “She picked out the man that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony. Case is over. Cease.”
However the prosecution continued. Sebold recognized him as her rapist at trial. Broadwater was convicted and finally served 16 years in state jail, and lived as a registered intercourse offender for almost 23 extra.
How Sebold described what occurred after the failed lineup identification has remained broadly constant through the years. However there have been completely different shadings within the account introduced in her 1999 memoir concerning the case and in her 2025 deposition testimony within the civil go well with. Her memoir suggests she was influenced by cops and a prosecutor. In “Fortunate,” she wrote that after the lineup she “searched the eyes of the uniformed man for whether or not I had chosen the proper one.” After that, she “felt a wave of nausea” and have become satisfied she had “chosen the flawed man.”
In her June 2025 deposition, Sebold testified that she knew earlier than she spoke to officers or the prosecutor, Gail Uebelhoer, that she had gotten the lineup choice flawed. However she additionally testified that “there was no means for me to make certain at the moment, after which sure issues occurred that stored reinforcing” that she had picked the flawed man, she stated, together with a glance of disappointment from a detective and Uebelhoer’s remarks to her.
These distinctions matter as a result of if police or prosecutors influenced Sebold, it might represent misconduct. And what occurred in these moments is especially related as a result of the prosecution made no try to pause the case or examine additional after the failed identification.
Uebelhoer had Sebold write an affidavit wherein she defined that she picked the person who had been standing subsequent to Broadwater as a result of he was taking a look at her. They regarded “virtually equivalent,” she acknowledged within the affidavit. Uebelhoer then advised her, in line with “Fortunate,” that she had been duped by Broadwater, who had requested that one other prisoner be included within the lineup as a result of all of the others differed from him noticeably in peak or weight. “He makes use of that good friend or that good friend makes use of him, in each lineup they do,” Uebelhoer stated. (Each males keep they’d by no means been in a lineup earlier than. Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she had little reminiscence of the Broadwater case.)
Sebold’s memoir later grew to become a bestseller, and thru a tangled sequence of occasions that started when producers determined to make a movie model of the memoir, the ebook finally helped result in Broadwater’s exoneration in 2021.
After his conviction was vacated, Broadwater sued the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment. The state agreed to pay $5.5 million in March 2023 to settle the case. Town of Syracuse and its surrounding county, in contrast, have to date resisted Broadwater’s claims in a separate lawsuit alleging that they violated his constitutional rights by a malicious prosecution.
Broadwater’s attorneys contend that the detective and prosecutor engaged in misconduct by making “false and extremely suggestive statements to [Sebold] that led her to establish Mr. Broadwater in courtroom,” after which stored these statements to themselves, which additional undermined his protection.
That’s the place Gershman is available in. As writer of a textbook known as “Prosecutorial Misconduct,” he is among the nation’s foremost specialists on the topic. The textbook catalogs the methods prosecutors can abuse their powers. He has additionally warned prosecutors to be cautious of eyewitness identifications, citing them as “the biggest single supply of wrongful convictions.”
I had beforehand interviewed Gershman for a sequence I wrote on prosecutors who suffered no penalties after they withheld proof or dedicated different transgressions. It appeared pure that he’d have insights on the Broadwater case.
Once I spoke to Gershman in August 2024, I despatched him the transcript of the unique trial and the motions to vacate Broadwater’s conviction and requested if he might assist me establish whether or not there have been any parts of prosecutorial misconduct.
After he reviewed the supplies (and in addition learn a prolonged New Yorker story concerning the case), Gershman appeared beside himself. He advised me that he had by no means seen something fairly prefer it in his 60-year authorized profession. “I can’t consider a case the place a prosecutor has so clearly manipulated the witness into testifying in opposition to the individual accused of a criminal offense,” he stated. “I haven’t seen something so blatant; so grotesque as what I see right here.”
That was 2024. Then got here his project for town and county and his 2025 report. (Gershman stated he notified them on the outset that he had spoken to me.)
In his 2025 report, Gershman wrote that Uebelhoer had merely “expressed her opinions” concerning the lineup and was below no obligation to reveal what she stated to the protection. She “behaved correctly and professionally, and there may be nothing within the file that might remotely be used to undermine her integrity and professionalism.”
Once I known as Gershman lately to ask about his reversal, he insisted that he knew “completely nothing concerning the case” after we first talked and had no recollection of studying the transcript. He famous that he had not but learn Sebold’s memoir on the time of our dialog.
His pondering, he stated, had developed as he studied the case extra intently. Most vital, he stated, Sebold hadn’t but testified in a deposition for Broadwater’s go well with. “I don’t assume it’s honest to say that I could have made contradictions between what we talked about means again then and what I later discovered,” he stated.
His new opinion fixates on the portion of Sebold’s 2025 testimony the place she stated she acknowledged her inaccurate lineup choose on her personal. In our most up-to-date dialog, Gershman dismissed the account Sebold gave in her memoir and downplayed the elements of her testimony that have been extra ambiguous.
In Gershman’s view at present, Uebelhoer’s remarks had no affect on Sebold or the decision. Something that the prosecutor or officers stated after the lineup was “completely, virtually, gratuitous. It didn’t have any bearing on her identification,” Gershman stated. He famous that Sebold was requested at trial about her botched identification.
A number of hours after our interview final week, Gershman known as me once more, unprompted. He provided what appeared like one other zigzag. This time, he advised me that Uebelhoer did, in reality, commit misconduct, however that it hadn’t affected the end result.
Once I identified that his report explicitly acknowledged that the “prosecution engaged in no misconduct,” he stated he now needed to qualify that: “The prosecutors didn’t have interaction in misconduct, as I see it, which prejudiced the defendant’s constitutional rights. That’s what I meant to say.” As he summarized it, “She shouldn’t have stated what she stated, however it didn’t matter.” (Deeper in his report, he additionally referred to the statements from the detective and prosecutor as “irrelevant and incompetent.”)
Gershman emphasised that he had been requested to evaluate legality, not ethics. His project, he stated, was to establish whether or not Uebelhoer ought to’ve disclosed her remarks to Broadwater’s legal professionals earlier than trial, to not render a judgment on whether or not it was acceptable to make them.
“I took a authorized place that they didn’t need to be disclosed as a result of they didn’t represent Brady proof,” he stated, referring to the landmark Supreme Court docket ruling Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to reveal favorable proof to the accused.
“I don’t do that for the cash,” Gershman testified in his deposition, explaining that he was paid $10,000 for the project. “I do that as a result of I’m thinking about this type of work. I’m an educator.”
Ought to Broadwater’s civil go well with ever attain trial, Gershman will probably be questioned about his evolving positions. If that occurs, one problem shall be to persuade a jury that his present view is extra plausible than his earlier one.
