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If you read the article, it's a little more complicated. She picked the wrong guy out of a lineup--and the actual rapist was in the lineup, but with cut hair, styled differently, in different clothes. Which is absurd, and which is why eyewitness testimony, notoriously unreliable, should always be accompanied by something more when it comes to taking years from people's lives (which it was not in the original case). It is true, though, that people in positions of authority can influence a witness with very subtle, even unintentional, body language cues.
But I think you have to look at it from the other side, also. This woman was violently raped, and the fact that the rape happened is not in question. The man was eventually found, already in prison, and he confessed and gave details he would not otherwise have known. She fucked up, but a fucked up process validated her mistake by pushing on even when blood tests were inconclusive, and she lived believing she'd chosen correctly for a very long time. Memory is notoriously malleable, and for decades she believed that this man was the one who did it, until someone handed her a sheet of paper saying it had been proved he wasn't. Of course the initial reaction was disbelief and shock. You believe something on that emotional a subject for that long, no matter what it is, and when it's disproved you're shocked and the first question you ask is "how can this be?". When the answer shows that you've led to something terrible happening? Of course it's hard to accept. It's a human reaction. And you'll note that she was persuaded by evidence, and now believes this was not the man who did it. (Though obviously, it should have been the other way around--the jury should have had to have been persuaded by real evidence in the first place).
I'm not saying it's not utterly fucked up that a person (three particular people, actually, if you read the whole article) was convicted and put away on pretty much only a single witness statement. She shouldn't have had to have been persuaded he was innocent with DNA--a jury should have had to have been persuaded of the opposite. I'm not saying that the rape victim did not make a terrible mistake either. But human memory is downright bad sometimes, and we can be very certain about things we should not be certain about, and decades later, aftermath is a complicated thing.
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