Crime, courts & justice
True crime, courtroom drama, and the systems behind both. The cases and their consequences.
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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.
In 1990s Mississippi, a self-styled forensic dentist sent innocent men to death row on testimony that teeth marks matched a suspect. This is the story of one wrongful conviction and how bite-mark evidence — never validated by science — survived in courtrooms for decades.
Decades of forensic dramas have changed what juries expect from evidence and how prosecutors and defense attorneys argue their cases — an unintended consequence of entertainment on real verdicts.
How the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit built the idea of profiling serial offenders, what the research actually supports, and how popular culture inflated it into something far more certain than it is.
After World War II, the world faced an unprecedented question: how do you put a regime on trial? Trace how Nuremberg built the legal machinery for prosecuting atrocity and shaped international law ever since.
Courts increasingly use risk-assessment software to inform bail, sentencing, and parole. Explore how these tools work, the evidence of built-in bias, and the debate over letting algorithms shape justice.
An exploration of how the American criminal justice system transitioned from a trial-based model to a plea-negotiation machine, and the resulting 'trial penalty' that shapes modern justice.
Bite-mark analysis, hair comparison, and other techniques were treated as hard evidence for decades before being exposed as unreliable — how flawed forensics sent people to prison, and the ongoing reckoning.
True crime with the system attached. The stream covers the forensic junk science that convicted innocent people, how DNA exonerations exposed eyewitness memory, the forensic genealogy that caught the Golden State Killer, algorithmic sentencing, and the plea-bargain machine that made trials rare. Cases and their consequences — what the verdict changed, not just whodunit.
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