The town of Syracuse in upstate New York seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, Onondaga County Prosecutor William Fitzpatrick stood in court and criticized his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. With the support of the prosecutor, the conviction was overturned. Today, the same county government and that of its main city, Syracuse, continue to fight a lawsuit filed by Broadwater that seeks financial damages for the years he lost behind bars.
It appears that the conflicts are not limited to criminal authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecutions. A key city and county expert appears to be facing his own internal conflict — or, at a minimum, a sea change of opinion.
Syracuse’s paid expert, a veteran Pace University law professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025, saying city prosecutors “did not commit misconduct” in the Broadwater case. But a little more than a year earlier, Gershman told me that prosecutors had “built a case” against Broadwater, calling it “the most heinous form of prosecutorial misconduct — when the prosecutor creates guilt.” He went on to say, “‘Misbehavior’ is a little glib in this case. … It’s much worse than just bad behavior. It’s tyranny.”
In an interview for this article, Gershman said he changed his mind after looking deeper into the case. “The facts,” he said, are more “complex” and “nuanced” than how he initially understood them.
Lawyers for both sides in the Broadwater litigation declined to comment for this article.
Certainly, lawyers use paid experts of all stripes for all kinds of actions. But it is rare to see an expert take a position in court after expressing a different position to a journalist. “It’s not unethical to change your mind,” said Stephen Gillers, professor emeritus and ethics expert at New York University Law School. But, he added, Gershman’s change of heart is “embarrassing and it will undermine his credibility in the future.” A potential jury in the case might wonder what he really believes.
Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in criminal law and ethics, expressed a similar view. She called it “strange” that Gershman would be “willing to make such a strong comment and then take an expert position on behalf of one of the parties. That in itself is problematic. It raises concerns.” She said she views the role of commentator on a news story as different from that of an expert in a legal case. Commenters should approach this task from a neutral starting point, she said. On the other hand, being an expert has an inherently partisan aspect. “I think things get confusing if you do both,” Roiphe said.
ProPublica recently published an in-depth narrative investigation into the original criminal case which examined multiple failings in Broadwater’s prosecution and exposed a broader failure in Syracuse’s criminal justice system at the time, which allowed one or more serial rapists to continue their assaults — many of which bore similarities to the one for which Broadwater was convicted — for years.
The original case 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. At first, the police did not believe her, even though a medical examination and physical evidence supported her story. Five months later, Sebold spotted Broadwater on a busy street and believed he was her rapist. She reported the sighting to police and Broadwater was arrested.
From the beginning, the case hinged on Sebold’s testimony. But during a lineup, she identified a man other than Broadwater as her rapist. What happened immediately after this misidentification is at the heart of the current dispute.
In the opinion of the current prosecutor, Fitzpatrick, the prosecution should have stopped when Sebold chose someone else: “You know, she didn’t choose the culprit. fake guys. She chose the guy,” Fitzpatrick told me in the previous article. “She chose the guy who she said had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony. The matter is over. Stop.”
But the prosecutions continued. Sebold identified him as her rapist during the trial. Broadwater was convicted and ultimately served 16 years in state prison, and lived as a registered sex offender for almost 23 more years.
The way Sebold described what happened after the failure to identify the composition has remained broadly consistent over the years. But there have been different nuances in the account presented in his 1999 memoir of the case and in his 2025 testimony in the civil trial. Her memoir suggests she was influenced by police officers and a prosecutor. In “Lucky,” she wrote that after the line, she “searched in the eyes of the man in uniform if I had chosen the right one.” After that, she “felt a wave of nausea” and became convinced she had “chosen the wrong man.”
In her June 2025 deposition, Sebold said she knew before speaking to police officers or prosecutor Gail Uebelhoer that she had made a mistake in selecting the lineup. But she also testified that “I had no way of knowing for sure at the time, and then certain things happened that kept reinforcing” that she had chosen the wrong man, she said, including a detective’s disappointed look and Uebelhoer’s remarks toward her.
These distinctions are important because if police or prosecutors influenced Sebold, it could constitute misconduct. And what happened at those times is particularly relevant because the prosecution made no attempt to stay the case or investigate further after the failed identification.
Uebelhoer asked Sebold to write an affidavit in which she explained that she chose the man standing next to Broadwater because he was looking at her. They looked “nearly identical,” she said in the affidavit. Uebelhoer then told her, according to “Lucky,” that she had been deceived by Broadwater, who had requested that another prisoner be included in the lineup because everyone else differed significantly from him in height or weight. “He uses this friend or this friend uses him, in every lineup,” Uebelhoer said. (Both men claim they had never stood in line before. Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she had little memory of the Broadwater affair.)
Sebold’s memoir later became a bestseller, and through a tangled series of events that began when producers decided to make a film version of the memoir, the book ultimately contributed to Broadwater’s exoneration in 2021.
After his conviction was overturned, 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. The city of Syracuse and its surrounding county, on the other hand, have so far resisted Broadwater’s claims in a separate lawsuit, alleging they violated its constitutional rights through malicious prosecution.
Broadwater’s lawyers say the detective and prosecutor engaged in misconduct by making “false and highly suggestive statements to [Sebold] this led her to identify Mr. Broadwater in court,” and then kept those statements to herself, further undermining her defense.
This is where Gershman comes in. As the author of a manual entitled “Prosecutorial misconduct“, he is one of the country’s foremost experts on the subject. The manual lists the ways prosecutors can abuse their powers. He also warned Prosecutors should be wary of eyewitness identifications, citing them as “the largest source of wrongful convictions.”
I had already interviewed Gershman for a series I’ve written about prosecutors who faced no consequences when they withheld evidence or committed other transgressions. It seemed natural that he would have ideas about the Broadwater affair.
When I spoke to Gershman in August 2024, I sent him the transcript of the original trial and the motions to overturn Broadwater’s conviction and asked if he could help me identify whether there was any evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.
After reviewing the documents (and reading a long New York history on the case), Gershman seemed beside himself. He told me he had never seen anything like it in his 60 years of legal career. “I can’t think of a case where a prosecutor would have so clearly manipulated the witness into testifying against the person accused of a crime,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything as blatant or as grotesque as what I see here.”
That was in 2024. Then came his mission for the city and county and his report for 2025. (Gershman said he informed them from the beginning that he spoke to me.)
In her 2025 report, Gershman wrote that Uebelhoer had merely “expressed her opinions” about the composition and was not required to disclose what she said to the defense. She “behaved properly and professionally, and there is nothing in the record that could be used to undermine her integrity and professionalism.”
When I recently called Gershman to ask about his reversal, he insisted that he knew “absolutely nothing about the case” when we first spoke and had no recollection of reading the transcript. He noted that he had not yet read Sebold’s memoir at the time of our conversation.
His thinking, he said, had evolved as he studied the case more closely. More importantly, he added, Sebold had yet to testify in a deposition in Broadwater’s trial. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that I may have created contradictions between what we were talking about at the time and what I later learned,” he said.
Her new opinion focuses on the part of Sebold’s 2025 testimony where she said she self-recognized her erroneous alignment choice. In our most recent conversation, Gershman rejected the account Sebold gave in his memoir and downplayed the parts of his testimony that were most ambiguous.
According to Gershman, Uebelhoer’s remarks had no impact on Sebold or the verdict. All the prosecutor or police said after the lineup was “totally, almost free. It had no bearing on her identification,” Gershman said. He noted that Sebold was questioned at trial about her botched identification.
A few hours after our interview last week, Gershman called me back, unprompted. He proposed what looked like another zigzag. This time he told me that Uebelhoer had indeed made a mistake, but that it had not affected the result.
When I pointed out that his report explicitly stated that “the prosecution committed no wrongdoing,” he said he now wanted to qualify: “The prosecutors did not commit any wrongdoing, in my view, that would have violated the defendant’s constitutional rights.” That’s what I intended to say. » As he summed it up: “She shouldn’t have said what she said, but that didn’t matter. (Later in his report, he also called the detective’s and prosecutor’s statements “irrelevant and incompetent.”)
Gershman emphasized that he was asked to evaluate legality, not ethics. His mission, he said, was to examine whether Uebelhoer should have disclosed his remarks to Broadwater’s lawyers before the trial, not to rule on whether he should have made them.
“I took a legal position that they didn’t need to be disclosed because they weren’t evidence for Brady,” he said, referring to the landmark Brady v. Supreme Court ruling. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to disclose evidence favorable to the accused.
“I’m not doing this for the money,” Gershman said in his deposition, explaining that he received $10,000 for the assignment. “I do this because this kind of work interests me. an educator.
If Broadwater’s civil suit were to proceed to trial, Gershman would likely be questioned about his evolving positions. If that happens, one of the challenges will be convincing the jury that their current point of view is more credible than the previous one.
