Odd odds.

I'm very glad they caught this serial rapist. I remember how it felt to be a woman living in NYC at the time these attacks were occurring. But can the NYT aim a little copy editing at this?

The near-perfect match between Mr. Worrell's DNA and the sample recovered from the Manhattan victim's underwear means that the odds that he is the assailant are more than a trillion to one...

Wouldn't that make Worrell the least likely suspect?

UPDATE: Now, based on the discussion in the comments, I'm thinking I'm wrong. Or the odds that I'm wrong are... high.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A "trained probabilist" has arrived in the comments and is defending my original post, making odds of my being right higher. Or at least different.

MORE: Let me make an updated copy-editing point. Statistics should be stated in a very clear way that doesn't cause readers to stop and puzzle about which way the numbers work. So they could have written, for example: "There is only a one in a trillion chance that he is not the assailant."

By the way, does this statistic bother you because one trillion is far MORE that the total number of human beings who have ever lived? [Sorry, I had "less" there for a while-- and, me, talking about copy-editing....]