The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a famous miscarriage of justice. William Fitzpatrick, the district attorney for Onondaga County, reacted in court nearly five years ago by criticizing Anthony Broadwater’s conviction for the murder of publisher Alice Sebold. With the DA’s assistance, the conviction was thrown out. The county government’s main city, Syracuse, and the county government are still fighting a lawsuit that Broadwater filed seeking monetary damages for his years of detention.
The wars, it seems, aren’t just between judicial authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original trial. A significant authority on the city and county appears to be having a personal issue with himself or at least have had a significant change of opinion.
Syracuse’s paid professional, a former Pace University law professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025 asserting that the state’s lawyers “did not indulge in misbehavior” in the Broadwater situation. However, Gershman claimed that prosecutors had “manufactured a event” against Broadwater and that it was” the most horrible form of legal misconduct — when the counsel is creating guilt,” a little over a year prior. He went on to say,”‘ Misconduct’ is kind of slick in this case. It’s far worse than just simple misconduct. This is tyranny”.
Gershman claimed in an interview for this essay that after looking into the situation more thoroughly, he changed his mind. ” The details”, he said, are more” difficult” and “nuanced” than how he first understood them.
Doctors on both sides of the Broadwater dispute declined to comment on this article.
Truly, doctors retain paid professionals of every line for all sorts of activities. However, it’s uncommon for an expert to get a place in court after expressing a different one to a reporter. ” It’s not unethical to change your mind”, said Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor and ethics specialist at New York University School of Law. However, he continued, Gershman’s turnaround is” an embarrassment and it’s going to destroy his credibility going ahead.” A prospective jury in the case may wonder what he really believes.
Elizabeth Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School with a background in criminal law and ethics, offered a similar opinion. She called it “odd” that Gershman had “be willing to give for a clearly worded comment and then take a position as an expert on behalf of one of the events. That is dangerous in and of itself. It raises issues”. She claimed that being an expert in a legal situation is distinct from being a critic for a news story. Commentators may approach the process from a starting point of independence, she said. By contrast, having an expert has an essentially political component. ” I think it gets confused if you do both”, Roiphe said.
A more in-depth narrative analysis of the original criminal case was just released by ProPublica that examined numerous shortcomings in the prosecution of Broadwater and found a wider failure in Syracuse’s criminal justice system that allowed one or more prolific rapists to carry out assaults for years, many of which bore similarities to those for which Broadwater had been found guilty.
The classic scenario dates back to the early hours of May 8, 1981, when Sebold, then a Syracuse University rookie, was brutally raped in a park near campus. Even though a medical examination and physical facts first disproven her bill, the police immediately did not believe her. Five months later, Sebold spotted Broadwater on a busy street and believed him to get her murderer. She called the police about the incident, and Broadwater was taken into custody.
From the beginning, the situation hinged on Sebold’s evidence. However, she identified a different person as her murderer at a performance. What happened straight after that misindentification is at the center of the latest dispute.
According to the current DA, Fitzpatrick, the trial should have stopped when Sebold picked someone otherwise:” You know, she didn’t picked out the bad guy. She picked out the guy”, Fitzpatrick told image for the earlier article. She chose the man she believed had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony. The game is through. Stop”.
But the trial continued. Sebold identified him as her murderer at trial. Broadwater was found guilty and served 16 times in state prison before resuming her sex-offender status. She also pratiqued sexual abuse for almost 23 more.
How Sebold described what happened after the unsuccessful portfolio identifying has remained broadly constant over the years. However, there have been various nuances in the details that were presented in her 1999 narrative about the situation and in her 2025 accumulation testimony in the legal case. Her narrative suggests she was influenced by police officials and a counsel. In” Lucky,” she claimed that she” searched the eyes of the armed man for whether I had chosen the right one” after the portfolio. After that, she “felt a wave of nausea” and became convinced she had” chosen the wrong man”.
Sebold testified in her testimony from June 2025 that she was aware of the portfolio choice error before speaking with police or the prosecutor, Gail Uebelhoer. But she also testified that” there was no way for me to be sure at that time, and therefore sure things happened that kept reinforcing” that she had picked the wrong man, she said, including a look of disappointment from a policeman and Uebelhoer’s remarks to her.
These similarities are important because they could lead to wrongdoing if officers or prosecutors influenced Sebold. And what happened in those times is especially important because the trial made no attempt to delay the situation or research further after the failed identification.
Sebold was given the order to sign an affidavit by Uebelhoer, in which she claimed she chose the gentleman who was standing next to Broadwater because he was staring at her. They looked “almost identical”, she stated in the oath. Then, according to” Lucky,” Uebelhoer informed her that she had been duped by Broadwater, who had requested that another prisoner be added because the other prisoners had significantly different height or weight from him. ” He uses that friend or that companion uses him, in every portfolio they do”, Uebelhoer said. ( Both men assert that they have never previously played in a lineup. ) Uebelhoer declined to get interviewed by ProPublica. She testified in a testimony to be in 2025 that she had little memory of the Broadwater situation.
Sebold’s narrative eventually became a bestseller, and through a tangled series of events that began when manufacturers decided to make a film version of the narrative, the book ultimately helped lead to Broadwater’s conviction in 2021.
Broadwater sued the state of New York for unlawful imprisonment after his conviction was overturned. The state agreed to pay$ 5.5 million in March 2023 to settle the case. By contrast, Broadwater’s lawsuit alleges that Syracuse and its surrounding county have harmed him by bringing a malicious prosecution against him in a separate lawsuit.
Broadwater’s attorneys contend that the detective and prosecutor engaged in misconduct by making “false and highly suggestive statements to]Sebold ] that led her to identify Mr. Broadwater in court”, and then kept those statements to themselves, which further undermined his defense.
That’s where Gershman comes in. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject, and he is the author of the textbook” Prosecutorial Misconduct.” The textbook catalogs the ways prosecutors can abuse their powers. He has also cautioned prosecutors against eyewitness identifications, calling them” the biggest single source of wrongful convictions.”
I had previously interviewed Gershman for a series I wrote on prosecutors who suffered no consequences when they withheld evidence or committed other transgressions. He seemed to have some insight into the Broadwater case, which seemed natural.
When I spoke to Gershman in August 2024, I sent him the transcript of the original trial and the motions to vacate Broadwater’s conviction and asked if he could help me identify whether there were any elements of prosecutorial misconduct.
After reading the case’s details and reading a lengthy New Yorker article, Gershman appeared on edge. He told me that he had never seen anything quite like it in his 60-year legal career. He said,” I can’t recall a case where a prosecutor has so blatantly manipulated the witness into giving evidence against the person accused of a crime.” ” I haven’t seen anything so blatant, so grotesque as what I see here”.
That year was 2024. Then came his assignment for the city and county and his 2025 report. ( Gershman claimed that he had already notified them of his conversation with them. )
In his 2025 report, Gershman wrote that Uebelhoer had merely “expressed her opinions” about the lineup and was under no obligation to disclose what she said to the defense. There is nothing in the record that could even be used to undermine her integrity and professionalism, and she “behaved properly and professionally.”
When I called Gershman recently to ask about his reversal, he insisted that he knew “absolutely nothing about the case” when we first talked and had no recollection of reading the transcript. He pointed out that at the time of our conversation, he had not yet read Sebold’s memoir.
His thinking, he said, had evolved as he studied the case more closely. Sebold, he claimed, hadn’t yet given his testimony in a hearing for Broadwater’s lawsuit, making it the most significant. ” I don’t think it’s fair to say that I may have made contradictions between what we talked about way back then and what I later learned”, he said.
Sebold’s testimony in 2025, where she claimed she had recognized her false lineup pick, is the subject of his new opinion. In our most recent conversation, Gershman dismissed the account Sebold gave in her memoir and downplayed the parts of her testimony that were more ambiguous.
In Gershman’s opinion, Uebelhoer’s remarks today didn’t have an impact on Sebold or the verdict. Anything that the prosecutor or officers said after the lineup was” totally, almost, gratuitous. Gershman claimed that it had no bearing on her identification. He noted that Sebold was asked at trial about her botched identification.
Unprompted, Gershman called me once more shortly after our interview last week. He offered what seemed like another zigzag. He claimed that Uebelhoer did indeed commit misconduct, but that it had not had an impact on the outcome this time.
When I pointed out that his report explicitly stated that the “prosecution engaged in no misconduct”, he said he now wanted to qualify that:” The prosecutors did not engage in misconduct, as I see it, which prejudiced the defendant’s constitutional rights. That’s what I was trying to say. As he summarized it,” She shouldn’t have said what she said, but it didn’t matter”. He also refers to the statements made by the detective and the prosecutor as “irrelevant and incompetent” ( Deeper in his report ).
Gershman emphasized that he had been asked to assess legality, not ethics. His job, he claimed, was to determine whether Uebelhoer should have made her remarks public before the trial and not to decide whether it was appropriate to do so.
” I took a legal position that they didn’t have to be disclosed because they didn’t constitute Brady evidence”, he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to disclose favorable evidence to the accused.
Gershman claimed in his deposition that he was paid$ 10,000 for the assignment and that he didn’t do it for the money. ” I do this because I’m interested in this kind of work. I’m a teacher.
Should Broadwater’s civil suit ever reach trial, Gershman will likely be questioned about his evolving positions. If that occurs, it will be difficult to persuade a jury from his or her previous opinion that it is more plausible.
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