The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, the district attorney of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in court and excoriated his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. With the DA’s support, the conviction was thrown out. 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.
The conflicts, it seems, aren’t simply between criminal authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecution. A key expert for the city and county seems to be experiencing an internal conflict of his own — or, at minimum, a dramatic change in opinion.
Syracuse’s paid expert, a veteran Pace University law professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025 asserting that the city’s prosecutors “did not engage in misconduct” in the Broadwater case. But a little over a year before that, Gershman told me that prosecutors had “manufactured a case” against Broadwater, calling it “the most heinous kind of prosecutorial misconduct — when the prosecutor is creating guilt.” He went on to say, “‘Misconduct’ is kind of glib in this case. … It’s so much worse than plain misconduct. This is tyranny.”…