Contrary to arguments made by a prosecutor at two trials in 1990, four strands of hair were never "matched" to any of the Harlem teenagers accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park, a former police scientist said this week.
The hairs, attributed to the victim and recovered from the clothing of two suspects, were the only pieces of physical evidence offered by prosecutors directly linking any of the teenagers to the crime. The hairs were also cited by the prosecution as a way for the jury to know that the videotaped confessions of the teenagers were reliable.
Nicholas Petraco, a detective who examined the hairs when he worked in the Police Department's criminalistics division and testified at the trials, said the technique for hair examination in 1990 was not powerful enough to tie anyone to the crime with certainty.
"'You can't say 'match,'" Mr. Petraco said. "It's impossible. You could never say it 'matched.' It's ridiculous."
At most, Mr. Petraco said, the hairs could be described as ''consistent with and similar to'' those of the defendants and the victim. The reason he used those words when he testified at the two trials, he said, was to make sure that the jurors and lawyers realized it was entirely possible for the hair to have come from other people.
In fact, earlier this year (2002 at the time of the article), advanced DNA tests not available in 1990 showed precisely that: the hairs did not come from the jogger, and do not link any of the five convicted men to the crime.
While Mr. Petraco avoided making an absolute link between the hairs and any person during his testimony, the lead prosecutor, Elizabeth Lederer, showed no such reticence. In her closing arguments, she used emphatic language to assert that hair found on a defendant, Kevin Richardson, had been "matched" and vouched for the reliability of the vigorously contested confessions.
"Perhaps the most telling of all," Ms. Lederer said, "is the hair that was found on Kevin Richardson's clothes."
She referred the jurors to the testimony of Mr. Petraco, the expert witness called by the prosecution. But in parts of her recitation, his cautious phrasing vanished.
"He found on Kevin Richardson's underpants a hair that matched the head hair of" the victim, Ms. Lederer told the jurors. "And there was a second hair on the T-shirt that matched" the victim's pubic hair. She continued: "There was yet a third hair on his jeans, on his blue jeans, that was consistent with and similar to" hair from the victim's head.
