Mr. Lubet said he was not convinced. In a follow-up article posted by The New Republic, he pointed to what he called “serious discrepancies” between her two accounts, including her descriptions of her mental state.

Ms. Goffman’s statement suggests that “the story in the book wasn’t true,” Mr. Lubet said in an interview, adding, “One has to wonder what else she embellished.”

Mr. Lubet, a former legal services lawyer and juvenile and criminal defense lawyer now better known for books about historical trials, said he had “no agenda.” But some of Ms. Goffman’s defenders question his tactics.

Jack Katz, an ethnographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-editor of the University of Chicago Press series in which “On the Run” appeared, said that Mr. Lubet’s review — which ran under the headline “Did This Acclaimed Sociologist Drive the Getaway Car in a Murder Plot?” in The New Republic — was “sensationalist” and itself ethically questionable.

“It’s a misuse of professorial authority to go after someone as a prosecutor on a fragment of evidence and push them to provide more evidence to defend themselves,” Mr. Katz said.

Ms. Goffman, he added, deserved credit, not censure, for her frankness in the book.

“Yes, there’s a real ethical question here, and Alice raised it herself in the book,” he said. “Countless researchers have done research with gangs and drug networks and have simply held themselves back from reporting how close they were personally to various situations. Because of her honesty to the research community, she’s being hounded.”

Several other sociologists said that Ms. Goffman’s account had disturbed them, even if they did not endorse Mr. Lubet’s approach. Philip Cohen, a professor at the University of Maryland who has written extensively about “On the Run” on his blog, said he was personally bothered less by any potential criminal liability in Ms. Goffman’s behavior than by his belief “that human beings just shouldn’t act like that.” “Regardless of which version of the story you believe, it was not good behavior,” he said.