The petition against Ms. Lederer, in part, reduces her life in public service to a single moment, the jogger case. In fact, she has a lengthy résumé of unchallenged convictions in cold cases, having pursued investigations of forgotten crimes. No one lives without error. And designating a single villain completely misses the point and power of the documentary. The jogger case belongs to a historical moment, not any one prosecutor or detective; it grew in the soils of a rancid, angry, fearful time.

Politicians called for blood. Donald Trump campaigned for the return of the death penalty. Much of the news media failed to note the vast inconsistencies in the case. Among the skeptics, people like me had mumbled, rather than shouted, our doubts.

Advocates for the accused were undercut by demonstrators who marched outside the courthouse in 1990, and chanted that the attack had been a hoax or that the jogger’s boyfriend had done it. At least two defense lawyers dozed through parts of the trials. At parole hearings, the boys denied having any contact with the jogger, but acknowledged having been in the park that night with a mob that had hassled or hurt others.

Ms. Lederer wrongly told the jury that hair found in the clothing of one of the boys “matched” hair from the victim, a seeming corroboration of the confused, rambling confessions. Even at the time, that overstated the evidence. More than a decade later, DNA tests would show that the hair did not come from the jogger.

Mistakes were made. But not just by Elizabeth Lederer, who is not discussing the matter in public.

In 2002, the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, came to believe that the five young men almost certainly had nothing to do with the crime. A serial rapist and killer had come forward and persuasively said that he alone had attacked the jogger. After an investigation, Mr. Morgenthau asked that the convictions be overturned.

(A fund-raiser on May 14 for his successor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., is being hosted by Linda Fairstein, the former chief of the unit that prosecuted the case, who continues to insist that the right people were convicted.)

The petition organizer, Mr. Chi, acknowledged that the film had indeed made clear that the case had been a collective failure. So why single out Ms. Lederer? “Columbia Law had spun her involvement in the Central Park case in a positive way on the faculty page,” Mr. Chi said. “I’m glad that I did it.”

Mention of the case has been removed from her online Columbia biography.

That is not all the petition has accomplished. It was a simple task to discover Elizabeth Lederer on Google, just as those boys were easy to find in the park. The petition has found someone to blame, repeating the very mistake of the injustice it deplores.