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NEW YORK — The woman, dirty, disheveled and in tears, ran over to a patrol car parked along a Harlem street in the early morning of Jan. 18, 1991. She told police officers she had been kidnapped at knifepoint near her home in Queens and raped by three black men, whom she identified.

Before the end of the month, police arrested two of the men she had named — Gregory Counts, then 19, and VanDyke Perry, then 21. The third man was never caught.

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Investigators had no physical evidence connecting the men to the crime or the crime scenes. Semen recovered from the woman, identified in court records as “the complainant,” did not belong to the accused. The prosecution’s case relied solely on her testimony, which was inconsistent, court records show. Defence attorneys argued that the case was poorly investigated and that the complainant, a recovering crack addict, fabricated the story to protect her boyfriend, who shot Perry two months earlier and was wanted by the police, court records show.