The city of Syracuse in upstate New York appears to be contradicting itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick went to court and denounced the county’s decades-old decision to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. The conviction was dismissed in favor of the public prosecutor’s office. The county government and the government of its main city, Syracuse, are still fighting a lawsuit filed by Mr. Broadwater seeking financial damages for the years he lost in prison.
The conflict appears to be not just between criminal authorities, who see Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecution. The city and county’s leading expert appears to be experiencing his own internal conflict, or at least a dramatic shift in opinion.
Syracuse’s paid expert, Bennett Gershman, a veteran law professor at Pace University, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025, asserting that the city’s prosecutor’s office “involved no illegal activity” in the Broadwater case. But a little more than a year earlier, Gershman told Meme that prosecutors had “manufactured a case” against Broadwater, calling it “prosecutorial misconduct of the most heinous kind, where prosecutors are manufacturing guilt.” He continued: “In this case, ‘tort’ is a kind of slip-up. … It’s much worse than simple tort. It’s tyranny.”
In an interview for this article, Gershman said he changed his mind after digging deeper into the case. “The facts,” he said, are “more complex” and “nuanced” than he initially understood.
Lawyers for both sides of the Broadwater lawsuit declined to comment for this article.
Indeed, lawyers employ paid experts in all fields for all types of litigation. However, it is unusual for an expert to take a position in court after expressing a different position to a reporter. “It’s not unethical to change your mind,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at New York University School of Law and an ethics expert. But he added that Gershman’s reversal was “disgraceful and will damage his credibility going forward.” Potential jurors in this case may wonder what he really believes.
Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in criminal law and ethics, expressed a similar opinion. She said it is strange that Gershman would “make such strongly worded comments and then be willing to take the position of an expert on behalf of one party. That in itself is problematic. It raises concerns.” She said she believes her role as a commentator on news articles is different from her role as a litigation expert. Commentators should approach this challenge from a neutral starting point, she says. In contrast, being an expert has an inherently partisan dimension. “I think it would be confusing to do both,” Roife said.
ProPublica recently published a detailed narrative investigation of the original criminal case that examined multiple failures in Broadwater’s prosecution, revealing widespread flaws in Syracuse’s criminal justice system at the time. It became clear that the assaults by one or more serial rapists, many of which had similarities to the incidents for which Broadwater was convicted, had continued over a period of years.
The original incident dates back to the early hours of May 8, 1981, when Sebold, then a freshman at Syracuse University, was brutally raped in a park near campus. Initially, police did not believe her, even though medical examinations and physical evidence supported her account. Five months later, Sebold spotted Broadwater on a busy street and believed him to be her rapist. She reported the sighting to police and Mr Broadwater was arrested.
The case hinged on Sebold’s testimony from the beginning. However, during the line-up, she identified a man other than Broadwater as her rapist. What happened immediately after that misidentification is at the heart of the current case.
In current prosecutor Fitzpatrick’s view, the prosecution should have stopped the moment Sebold chose someone else. “You know, she didn’t pick the wrong guy. It’s the guy she picked,” Fitzpatrick told Meme in a previous article. “She singled out the man she thought raped her, and it wasn’t Anthony. Case closed. Stop.”
However, the prosecution continued. Sebold identified him at trial as her rapist. Broadwater was convicted and ultimately served 16 years in state prison, as well as nearly 23 years as a registered sex offender.
How Sebold described what happened after he failed to identify the lineup has remained fairly consistent over the years. But her 1999 memoir about the incident and her 2025 deposition testimony in a civil case showed mixed shades. Her memoirs suggest that she was influenced by police officers and prosecutors. In “Lucky,” she writes that after lining up her lineup, she “searched the eyes of the men in uniform to see if I had made the right choice.” Afterwards, she “felt a wave of nausea” and became convinced that she had “chosen the wrong man.”
In a June 2025 deposition, Seibold testified that he knew the lineup selection was wrong even before he spoke with the officers or prosecutor Gail Uebelhall. However, she also testified that, “I wasn’t sure at the time, but then events occurred that further reinforced that I had chosen the wrong man,” including the detective’s look of disappointment and Uebelhall’s comments to her.
These distinctions are important because if police or prosecutors influenced Sebold, it could be an illegal act. And what happened in that moment is especially important because after the failed identification, prosecutors made no attempt to suspend the case or investigate further.
Uebelhall had Seibold write an affidavit in which she explained that she had chosen the man who was standing next to Broadwater because he had been looking at her. She said in the affidavit that they looked “nearly identical.” According to Lucky, Mr. Uebelhall later said that Mr. Broadwater had deceived him. Broadwater said he requested that another prisoner be added to the lineup because they were all significantly different heights and weights from him. “It’s the same in any lineup, whether he uses his friend or his friend uses him,” Uebelhall said. (Both men claim they have never been part of a lineup. Ms. Uebelhall declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she remembered little about the Broadwater incident.)
Sebold’s memoir went on to become a bestseller, and after a complicated series of events that began when producers decided to turn it into a film, the book ultimately contributed to Broadwater’s acquittal in 2021.
After his conviction was vacated, Broadwater sued the state of New York for false imprisonment. The state agreed to pay $5.5 million in March 2023 to settle the case. By contrast, the city of Syracuse and surrounding counties have so far resisted Broadwater’s claims in a separate lawsuit that they violated their constitutional rights through malicious prosecution.
Broadwater’s lawyers claim that detectives and prosecutors “committed misconduct against Broadwater by making false and highly suggestive statements.” [Sebold] She therefore ended up identifying Mr. Broadwater in court,” and then kept those statements secret, which further weakened his defense.
Anthony Broadwater Lauren Petracca/New York Times/Redux
That’s where Mr. Gershman comes in. He is the author of the textbook “Prosecutor Misconduct” and is one of the nation’s leading experts on the subject. Textbooks enumerate ways in which prosecutors abuse their power. He also warned prosecutors to be cautious in identifying eyewitnesses, saying eyewitness identification is “the single largest source of wrongful convictions.”
I previously interviewed Mr. Gershman for a series about prosecutors who suppressed evidence and committed other violations with impunity. It seemed natural that he would have insight into the Broadwater affair.
When I spoke with Mr. Gershman in August 2024, I sent him the original trial record and the motion to vacate Mr. Broadwater’s conviction and asked if he could help us identify whether there was an element of prosecutorial misconduct.
After reviewing the documents (and reading the long New Yorker article about the case), Mr. Gershman seemed beside himself. He told me he had never seen a situation like this in his 60-year legal career. “I can’t think of a case in which a prosecutor so clearly manipulated a witness into testifying against a criminal suspect,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything as blatant and grotesque as what I saw here.”
That was in 2024. A mandate and 2025 report to the city and county was then submitted. (Mr. Gershman said he let them know he had spoken to me first.)
Mr. Gershman wrote in his 2025 report that Mr. Uebelhall merely “expressed his opinion” about the lineup and was under no obligation to reveal what he said to the defense. She “acted appropriately and professionally, and there is nothing on the record that could compromise her integrity and professionalism.”
When I called Mr. Gershman recently to ask about the reversal, he claimed that when we first spoke, he “knew absolutely nothing about the incident” and had no recollection of reading the transcript. He said he had not yet read Sebold’s memoir at the time of our conversation.
He said his thinking evolved as he studied the case more closely. Most importantly, Sebold has not yet testified in a deposition in the Broadwater case, he said. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that there may have been a discrepancy between what we said a long time ago and what we later learned,” he said.
His new opinion focuses on a portion of Sebold’s 2025 testimony in which she said she recognized the error in her lineup selection. In our recent conversation, Gershman dismissed the account Sebold gave in her memoir and downplayed the more ambiguous parts of her testimony.
In Mr. Gershman’s view today, Mr. Überhall’s remarks had no effect on Sebold or the sentence. Gershman said that what prosecutors and police officers said after the line up was “absolutely, almost gratuitously. It had nothing to do with her identification.” He noted that Sebold was questioned about failing to provide identification at trial.
A few hours after last week’s interview, Mr. Gershman called me again out of the blue. He suggested what looked like another zigzag. This time, he told me that Mr. Huberhall had indeed committed an illegal act, but that it had no effect on the outcome.
When I pointed out that his report clearly stated that “the prosecutor did not commit any illegal acts,” he said he wanted to make that finding, saying, “As I see it, the prosecutor did not do anything illegal that would undermine the defendant’s constitutional rights. That’s what I meant.” He summed it up by saying, “She shouldn’t have said what she said, but it didn’t matter.” (In his report, he also called the statements of detectives and prosecutors “irrelevant and incompetent.”)
Gershman stressed that he was asked to evaluate legality, not ethics. He said his job was to determine whether Mr. Uebelhall’s statements should have been disclosed to Broadwater’s lawyers before trial, not to pass judgment on whether they were appropriate.
“We took the legal position that it didn’t need to be disclosed because it didn’t qualify as Brady evidence,” he said, referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brady v. Maryland decision, which requires prosecutors to disclose evidence favorable to the defendant.
“I’m not in this job for the money,” Gershman testified in a deposition, explaining that he was paid $10,000 for the assignment. “I’m doing this job because I’m interested in this kind of work. I’m an educator.”
If Mr. Broadwater’s civil suit goes to trial, Mr. Gershman is likely to face questions about the development of his position. If that happens, one challenge will be convincing jurors that his current version is more reliable than his previous version.
