For those who thought, as I did, that the best way to resolve the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case was to have a jury decide his guilt or innocence, the brief filed this week by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., shows in powerful detail why that approach almost certainly would have been unethical and a fool’s errand.

Take, for instance, the story of the gang rape that the hotel housekeeper, Nafissatou Diallo, told and retold, and that seemed to have been associated with her application for asylum.

Many people might have been inclined to write off the gang-rape tale as the sort of tactical fiction that people deploy to gain entry to the United States. Such a lie would make sense in Darwinian terms, conferring an advantage on her and her child, but seem to have little bearing on her credibility about Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Ms. Diallo did not, in fact, tell the gang-rape lie on her asylum application.