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A defendant is acquitted of murder, then later confesses, or DNA proves the jury wrong. For centuries the law's answer was that nothing could be done. This episode traces double jeopardy from Roman law through 800 years of English common law, where it shielded citizens from a state with unlimited time and money to retry them until it won. The price was accepted openly: better that some guilty people go free than that the government hold power to prosecute a person without end.

That bargain broke down in the face of real cases. In England, Billy Dunlop was acquitted of killing Julie Hogg in 1989, later admitted it, and could be convicted only of perjury until her mother, Ann Ming, campaigned for change. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 now allows a retrial for the gravest crimes on new and compelling evidence. The episode compares the answers reached in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, India, and the United States, where separate governments can each prosecute the same act.

• In 2006 Dunlop pleaded guilty and became the first person convicted of murder after a previous acquittal for the same crime.
• In Australia's R v Carroll, the High Court overturned a perjury conviction because it contradicted the man's earlier acquittal for murdering a child.
• Under the American dual sovereignty doctrine, state and federal courts may both try the same act, a power used in the civil rights era after state juries acquitted.
• Timothy Hennis was acquitted of a triple murder in civilian court, then convicted of the same killings by a military court martial.
• A 1950 ruling in Japan treats a case as one continuous proceeding through every level of court, so prosecutors can appeal a not guilty verdict.

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A stagecoach stops on a dark English road, the door opens, and a man in velvet and lace bows and asks the lady inside for a dance. That was Claude Duval, born around 1643 in Normandy to a miller and a tailor's daughter. Sent to Paris as a servant at 14, he became a stable boy for exiled English royalists, followed them to England at the Restoration, and worked as a footman for the Duke of Richmond. Years of standing unnoticed in wealthy rooms taught him how the rich travelled and what they carried.

On the Holloway road between Highgate and Islington, he robbed with manners where others used violence. This episode treats that courtesy as a tactic as much as a charm: a bow and a smile confused victims who might otherwise have reached for a pistol. It follows his flight to France, his fatal return, his trial on January 17, 1670, and the centuries of plays, paintings, comics, and television that turned a convicted armed robber into a romantic hero.

• Duval took 50 guineas from Squire Roper, master of the royal buckhounds, and left him tied to a tree.
• In his most famous robbery he let a gentleman keep much of his money after the man's wife stepped out and danced a courante with him on the road.
• He was arrested at the Hole-in-the-Wall tavern in Covent Garden and convicted of six robberies by Judge Sir William Morton.
• Crowds, including wealthy women, petitioned King Charles II for a pardon. The king refused, and Duval was hanged at Tyburn at 26 or 27.
• His body was put on show at the Tangier Tavern, and his epitaph warned men to guard their purses and women their hearts.

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A hiker in southern Brazil leans a hand against a tree trunk and feels a sharp burn. No snake, no spider. The hand has landed on a cluster of Lonomia caterpillars, the larvae of a giant silkworm moth whose adults are harmless and often have no working mouthparts. The caterpillars look like lichen or a knot in the bark, and they rest together in dense groups low on the trunk. Their hollow, branching spines pierce skin, break off, and deliver venom from many insects at once.

The result is a syndrome called lonomiasis. The venom forces the body to burn through its clotting proteins until none are left, which can mean bleeding from the gums, from old wounds, and into the brain, along with ruptured red blood cells and acute kidney failure. This episode explains why a venom so toxic still kills only about 1.7 percent of victims, why encounters are rising as orchards replace forest, and how researchers hope to turn one of its enzymes into a new drug against dangerous clots.

• The genus has 14 recognized species spread across South America and Central America, with Lonomia electra reaching as far north as Mexico.
• The lethal dose for an 18 to 20 gram mouse is listed at just 0.19 milligrams given intravenously.
• Fatalities stay low because each spine carries a tiny amount of venom, so the danger depends on how many caterpillars are pressed against the skin.
• The caterpillars have adapted to plum, peach, and avocado trees, which puts farm workers and children in contact with them more often.
• Lonomia obliqua is the subject of hundreds of medical studies. The aim is to copy its clot-dissolving enzyme with recombinant DNA in bacteria or yeast, leaving the kidney-damaging toxins behind.

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The name Casanova now means a promiscuous lover, but Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was also a law graduate at 17, a cleric, a violinist, a spy, and a founder of the French state lottery. Born in Venice in 1725, he learned early that people want to believe in secret knowledge. When a senator named Bragadin suffered a stroke in a gondola, Casanova overruled the doctor, had a mercury ointment washed off, and then passed himself off as an oracle. The senator became his patron for life.

That same nerve carried him out of the Leads, the prison under the roof of the Doge's Palace, and into Paris in January 1757, where he sold the treasury on a lottery and posed as an alchemist under the title Chevalier de Seingalt. This episode follows his long con on the Marquise d'Urfe, his years wandering more than 4,000 miles between royal courts, the one woman who saw through him, and the lonely librarian's job in Bohemia where he wrote his 12-volume memoir, Histoire de ma vie.

• As a boy he was taken to a witch on the island of Murano for his nosebleeds. The cure failed, but her ritual taught him the power of theater.
• Arrested without trial in 1755, he smuggled an iron spike to a priest in the next cell inside the spine of a Bible, with a heaped plate of pasta on top to distract the jailer.
• His lottery asked bettors to pick up to five numbers from 1 to 90, and he took a percentage of ticket sales as a director.
• Henriette, the lover he praised above all others, left him first and slipped a large sum of money into his pocket as she went.
• He wrote up to 13 hours a day at Dux Castle to keep from going mad, and died in 1798 after learning that Napoleon had ended the Republic of Venice.

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Carlos Henrique Raposo, known as Carlos Kaiser, spent 14 years as a professional footballer while avoiding almost any actual football. Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1963, he had real youth spells at Botafogo and Flamengo and signed with the Mexican club Puebla in 1979, only to be released months later without a match. He loved the status and hated the work, so he turned the job into networking, befriending stars such as Carlos Alberto Torres and Renato Gaucho, whose word was enough to get him signed.

His method was consistent. He took short contracts, claimed he lacked match fitness, then faked a muscle injury that 1980s medicine could not disprove. A dentist supplied paperwork, friendly journalists printed invented triumphs, and a toy mobile phone let him pretend to turn down transfer offers. This episode follows the con from club to club, including the day a furious patron ordered him onto the pitch, and asks why teammates who knew the truth liked him and wanted him around.

• The nickname may honor Franz Beckenbauer, though friends say it came from his resemblance to a stubby bottle of Kaiser beer.
• At Botafogo a club doctor fluent in English realized his loud phone calls were gibberish. At Fluminense an assistant coach found the phone was hollow plastic.
• He borrowed the record of Argentine player Carlos Enrique, winner of the 1984 Copa Libertadores with Independiente, and presented those trophies as his own.
• Ordered to play for Bangu while the team trailed 2-0, he climbed a fence, fought his own supporters, and was sent off before crossing the touchline.
• He then told patron Castor de Andrade that the fans had called Andrade a thief, and walked away with a six-month contract extension.

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Type the word Candiru into Wikipedia and you get no answer, only a question about which Candiru you meant. This episode takes that short disambiguation page as its entire source and treats it as a study in how databases cope with human language. The page lists three things under the same seven letters: a number of fish species known by a common name, the Candiru phlebovirus, and an Israeli spyware company. A single line under See also points to Carandiru, a different word one syllable away.

The conversation works through each layer of the page. It covers the Parsoid engine that turns editors' wiki text into HTML, the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 license that keeps the content open, and the fact that the page exists only in English, German, and Dutch. It then asks why local common names clash with the unique identifiers a database needs, why the technology sector keeps borrowing words from biology, and what a built-in net for spelling mistakes says about how people search.

• A disambiguation page is compared to a railway switch that sends readers looking for a fish and readers looking for spyware down separate tracks.
• The fish entry covers several species at once, an example of folk naming that works on a river but breaks down in a global database.
• The phlebovirus belongs to a group typically carried by sand flies, mosquitoes, or ticks, and was named with no reference to the fish.
• A company that shares its name with a fish is not camouflaged by it. People researching river life land on cyber espionage by accident.
• The page carries a banner for the Wiki Loves Monuments 2026 photography competition, a reminder that the whole system depends on people documenting the physical world.

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A juror once complained to a judge that police had failed to dust the lawn for fingerprints. That story opens this episode on the CSI effect, the claim that the show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which premiered in 2000, rewired what the public expects from forensic science. On screen, lab technicians raid houses and interrogate suspects, plaster poured into a stab wound reveals the exact knife, and DNA results arrive before the commercial break. Real testing takes weeks or months, and real analysts avoid the word match.

Lawyers panicked in two directions: that jurors would acquit without flashy forensic proof, or convict on science they overvalued. Prosecutors began screening jurors by their viewing habits and hiring experts to explain why evidence did not exist. Then the data came in. A Michigan study of more than a thousand potential jurors found higher expectations but no link between watching crime shows and acquitting. The episode also follows the effect into universities, backlogged crime labs, and the habits of criminals.

• By 2005, six of the ten most popular shows in the United States were crime dramas, and one forensic scientist estimated that 40 percent of the techniques shown on CSI do not exist.
• After Robert Blake was acquitted of murder, the Los Angeles district attorney blamed the CSI effect and called the jurors incredibly stupid.
• A 2009 study of trial statistics in eight states found that the acquittal rate had gone down, not up, since the show began.
• Forensic programs at Florida International University and UC Davis doubled in size by 2004, while lab directors complained that graduates lacked basic science.
• A woman attacked by serial rapist Jonathan Haynes, inspired by the show, pulled out her own hair and hid it in his vehicle, which tied him to the crimes.

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Gulag was never a Russian word for prison. It was an acronym for a government office, the main directorate of correctional labor camps, run by the secret police from the 1930s. This episode examines the machinery behind the name: the tsarist exile system that once held Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, the early Bolshevik camps built to quarantine political enemies, and the monastery island of Solovki, where an inmate named Naftaly Frenkel proposed tying each prisoner's food ration to the share of a labor quota he fulfilled.

Under Stalin the camps became an engine for mining gold, felling timber, and building canals and railways in places like Kolyma. Arrests ran on quotas of their own, driven by the vague Article 58 and three-man troikas that issued sentences in minutes. The episode asks whether the system ever made economic sense, follows it through the catastrophic war years after June 1941, and ends with the opening of the archives and the argument over how many people it actually killed.

• Frenkel's nourishment scale cut rations for anyone who missed a quota, which left them weaker the next day. He was promoted from prisoner to camp commander.
• Before the war the camps produced 46 percent of Soviet nickel, 76 percent of its tin, and a quarter of its timber, yet the average inmate was half as productive as a free worker.
• A quarter of the entire camp population died in the winter of 1941, and roughly half of all Gulag deaths fell between 1941 and 1943.
• Archives suggest about 18 million people passed through the camps between 1930 and 1953, with 1.5 to 1.7 million recorded deaths.
• Commanders judged on mortality rates released roughly a million dying prisoners early so their deaths would not appear on the camp ledger.

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From 1996 to 2013, a lake on a golf course in Queensland, Australia held a thriving population of bull sharks. This episode explains how a marine predator ends up there. The bull shark is stocky and built for shallow, murky water, with females reaching 13 feet and over 1,300 pounds when pregnant. Its bite, measured at up to 1,330 pounds of force, is the strongest for its weight of any cartilaginous fish tested, which lets it eat nearly anything, turtle shells and rival sharks included.

Its real trick is fresh water, which kills most sharks by flooding their cells. A bull shark's kidneys flush the excess water, its rectal gland shuts down to save salt, its gills pull sodium and chloride from the river, and its liver adjusts both urea and buoyancy. Mothers use that ability to give birth in estuaries and rivers that larger predators cannot enter. The episode also covers the shark's reach inland, its close contact with people, its intelligence, and its vulnerable conservation status.

• Bull sharks have been documented 2,500 miles up the Amazon in Peru and as far up the Mississippi as Alton, Illinois.
• The sharks of Lake Nicaragua were long thought to be a separate species until tagging in the 1960s showed ocean sharks reaching the lake through the San Juan River in 7 to 11 days.
• Hunting by touch in zero visibility, they use a bump and bite technique, and they are widely believed responsible for the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks.
• Juveniles tracked in Florida's Caloosahatchee River ride the tides upriver and back down to offset the energy cost of regulating their salt balance.
• A barrier of flexible pipes holding permanent magnets overloads the shark's electrical sense and turns it away from swimming areas without nets or harm.

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Between 1784 and 1868, Britain shipped roughly 160,000 men, women, and children to penal colonies in Australia, and about four million Australians now trace their ancestry to them. This episode begins in the crowded, gin-soaked cities of 18th century England, where the Bloody Code made 222 crimes punishable by death, including stealing a rabbit. Juries refused to convict, jails overflowed into rotting prison hulks on the Thames, and the American Revolution closed the old outlet across the Atlantic.

The First Fleet of 11 ships left Portsmouth in May 1787 with about 775 convicts and reached Botany Bay in January 1788, only to find sandy soil and no reliable fresh water. Starvation followed at Sydney Cove. The episode moves through the horror of the Second Fleet, the ticket of leave that turned prisoners into wage earners and landowners, the freezing timber camps of Macquarie Harbour, and the silent cells of Port Arthur, before free colonists organized to end transportation altogether.

• The Second Fleet was contracted to slave trading firms paid per convict embarked, not per convict delivered alive, so they packed the ships and withheld rations.
• At Port Arthur's separate prison, men spent 23 hours a day in soundproof cells and wore cloth masks at exercise. An asylum was built next door.
• When Governor Richard Bourke capped floggings at 50 lashes in the 1830s, landowners protested that discipline and the economy would collapse.
• Roughly 80 percent of convicts were petty thieves, about one in seven were women, and thousands were political prisoners such as Irish nationalists, Chartists, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
• Samuel Speed, who burned a haystack in 1863 to get a jail cell and a meal, was transported in 1866 and died in Perth in 1938, believed to be the last surviving convict.