What is the price of a man’s life? For the practical justices of the New York State Court of Claims, this is a conundrum that must be addressed, not with philosophical speculation but rather a grim mathematics. And this past week the New York attorney general, Letitia James, approved the monetary settlement that had been agreed upon by this court and the lawyers for Anthony Broadwater, who had been wrongly convicted in 1982 for the rape of Alice Sebold, the celebrated author of The Lovely Bones, when she was a college freshman.
Broadwater, now a hunched and graying 62-year-old, had been the wrong man, his colossal misfortune measured out in the 16 and a half years he spent trapped in the unremitting hell of maximum-security prisons, the additional 8 years while his life was constricted by the tight bands of his parole, and the 22 years he spent branded as a Level 2 sex offender.
