Crime, courts & justice

In a British murder trial, one juror secretly researched the defendant online and shared what she found with the panel, collapsing months of proceedings. Her decision led to a rare prosecution of a juror and forced courts to confront what a fair trial means in the internet age. This is the story of how one click can unravel justice for everyone in the room.

In 1980s Australia, a handwriting expert's testimony convicted a mother of murdering her infant, until a scrap of fabric proved a dingo had taken the child. This is the story of how confident forensic certainty collapsed under a single physical discovery, and what it did to one family's name.

In 1970s America, a Spanish-speaking laborer signed an English confession he never understood, sending him to prison for a murder he didn't commit. This episode traces how a translation gap became a legal weapon and how the document was finally exposed.

When a clerical error in a European prison registry swapped two inmates' identities, one man served decades for a crime the record no longer connected to him. This is the story of how a bureaucratic slip became a life sentence, and the long fight to prove the machine was wrong.

In 1700s England, a servant named Elizabeth Canning vanished for a month and returned claiming kidnapping, triggering one of the century's most divisive trials. The case split London into warring factions and exposed how flimsy testimony could send someone to the gallows or the colonies. This is the story of a lie so tangled that no one has ever fully unraveled it.

After the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the FBI matched a partial fingerprint to an Oregon lawyer named Brandon Mayfield and jailed him — but Spanish investigators insisted the print belonged to someone else. This is the story of how three certified examiners agreed on a match that was flat wrong, and what it revealed about the myth of infallible forensics.