How an innocent Black man served time for the rape of author Alice Sebold

Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in jail as victim of miscarriage of justice but has accepted author's apology

On 4 November 1981, five Black men in matching light blue shirts filed into a narrow, well-lit room on the third floor of a police station in Syracuse, New York, and turned to face a one-way mirror. On the other side, a 19-year-old white student stepped towards the glass, and tried to identify which of them was her rapist.

The student, Alice Sebold, would go on to a storied literary career. She had been the subject of a horrific attack late one night in May of the same year, dragged into a tunnel from a path in a public park and forced to lie down among broken bottles.