Sexual assault toward women is a real thing. Lying about it is also a real thing.

I was struck by the WaPo story about wrongfully convicted Kevin Strickland exonerated after 43 years, they didn't listen to the woman when she tried over and over to recant:

[...] The case was built on the testimony of Cynthia Douglas, the sole survivor and eyewitness, who later attempted multiple times to recant her testimony because she said she was pressured by police.

 [....]

Douglas, who was dating Ingram, had joined Black and Walker in drinking cognac, smoking weed and watching “Three’s Company” when Bell, Adkins and others stormed in and tied all four up. After plundering the home, they killed Ingram, Black and Walker in execution-style slayings, court records state. Douglas, who suffered nonfatal gunshot wounds to her thigh, slumped next to Black, her best friend, and pretended to be dead until the group left.

She freed herself and limped out of the house looking for help, eventually finding a 17-year-old girl outside, according to police records. Douglas begged for a hiding spot: “They don’t know I’m alive. They think they killed me.”

[....]

Douglas — rattled less than 24 hours after she saw three of her friends brutally murdered — was shown a lineup of Black men that included Strickland. Eric Wesson, editor of the Kansas City Call, a Black-owned weekly newspaper, said she told him years later that she still had blood and brain matter on her face and in her hair. Douglas later acknowledged that police suggested she select a man in the lineup who went by “Nordy,” Strickland’s nickname 

[....]

“Just pick Strickland out of the lineup and we’ll be done,” Douglas recalled, according to court records. “It will all go away, you can go on, and you don’t have to worry about these guys no more.”

Douglas’s family has said Richard Zoulek, the detective who conducted the lineup, was the one who pressured her. John O’Connor, who worked as an investigator for the prosecutor’s office, described Zoulek in court this month as a “cowboy” known to have a bad reputation. Months after the killings, Zoulek fatally shot his wife and then took his own life, according to media reports.

[....]

His original trial in 1979 hinged on Douglas’s testimony. As the legal process went on, Douglas grew more convinced she had seen Strickland, even if she originally told police she did not know for sure. When asked by a county prosecutor whether there was “any doubt in your mind that the fellow with the shotgun was Kevin Strickland,” Douglas replied, “It is a fact.”

[.....]

they don't believe the other perps

Four months after Kevin Strickland went to prison, Bell told the court that Douglas “made a hell of a mistake” by mixing up Strickland with the teenager allegedly with Bell’s crew at the scene of the crime. Bell, who along with Adkins received a 20-year sentence for their guilty pleas, stressed to the court that Strickland was not with them.

“I’m telling you the truth today that Kevin Strickland wasn’t there at the house that day,” Bell said in 1979. “I’m telling you the truth. Kevin Strickland wasn’t at that house.”

they don't want to believe the sole surviving traumatized victim

As Strickland was fighting to have his case reexamined, Douglas was simultaneously trying to get someone to listen to her.

The first time Douglas approached a prosecutor after Bell’s testimony to indicate Strickland was not the right man, the prosecutor allegedly told her to go away and threatened her with a perjury charge, according to an affidavit signed by her ex-husband, Ronald Richardson. A similar incident happened in the 1990s, according to testimony from her sister, Cecile “Cookie” Simmons.

Wesson, who was friends with Douglas and Black growing up, said Douglas came to him for guidance in 2004, a shell of the funny, vibrant young woman he remembered. She contacted him again in 2009, wondering how she could get her recantation out there. He suggested drafting an email to an organization that would listen, such as the Midwest Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that aids wrongfully convicted individuals.

“I am seeking info on how to help someone that was wrongfully accused,” Douglas wrote, according to court records. “I was the only eyewitness and things were not clear back then, but now I know more and would like to help this person if I can.”

Strickland, too, had reached out to the Midwest Innocence Project. After Bushnell joined the organization, she was tasked with going through older applications in a backlog of cases. Immediately, she saw Strickland’s case as “a shaky conviction.”

“I started to think, ‘What’s going on here?’” Bushnell said. “You get into the details and you see how Bell said clearly what happened and who did it.”

But when Strickland found out that Douglas had died in 2015 at 57, before she had the chance to formally recant her testimony, he said it felt as if his chances at exoneration had also expired [....]

Lesson: as always, eyewitness testimony from a traumatized victim of a violent crime. It's not a slam dunk.

Meanwhile link from bottom of your page, no woman involved, and not black, just homeless:

Mistaken Identity Lands Man In Hawaii Mental Hospital For More Than 2 Years

No one believed Joshua Spriestersbach — not even his various public defenders — until a hospital psychiatrist finally listened.

JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER, AP @ Huff Post, 08/03/2021 04:24pm EDT

HONOLULU (AP) — Hawaii officials wrongly arrested a homeless man for a crime committed by someone else, locked him up in a state hospital for more than two years, forced him to take psychiatric drugs and then tried to cover up the mistake by quietly setting him free with just 50 cents to his name, the Hawaii Innocence Project said in a court document asking a judge to set the record straight.

A petition filed in court Monday night asks a judge to vacate the arrest and correct Joshua Spriestersbach’s records. The filing lays out his bizarre plight that started with him falling asleep on a sidewalk. He was houseless and hungry while waiting in a long line for food outside a Honolulu shelter on a hot day in 2017

When a police officer roused him awake, he thought he was being arrested for the city’s ban on sitting or laying down on public sidewalks.

But what he didn’t realize was that the officer mistook him for a man named Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug case.

It’s unclear how this happened as Spriestersbach and Castleberry had never met. Spriestersbach somehow ended up with Castleberry as his alias, even though Spriestersbach never claimed to be Castleberry, according to the Hawaii Innocence Project.

Spriestersbach’s attorneys argue it all could have been cleared up if police simply compared the two men’s photographs and fingerprints.

Instead, against Spriestersbach’s protests that he wasn’t Castleberry, he was eventually committed to the Hawaii State Hospital [....]

What's the main problem in both cases and in many other wrongful convictions?

I think it's in the WaPo article

Tricia Rojo Bushnell, his attorney and executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said Strickland’s case was “a great example of how much a system cares about finality over fairness.”