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Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Most of us have heard the term Devil's advocate used to describe someone who takes the wrong side of an argument, knowingly, essentially picking the side the devil would take. Longtime listeners of this show would know that this term originates in the legal code of the Catholic Church. As a reminder, in order for a saint to be canonized, an expert needed to take the stand to give their best arguments for why the person shouldn't become a saint. And the Latin title for that role was Advocatus Diabali, the Devil's advocate. The connection between the devil and legal minutiae goes even deeper than that, though. In fact, the first appearance of the term Satan in the Bible is referring not to a proper name, but a role being performed by another heavenly deity. The term Satan means accuser or adversary. In the Book of Job, for example, it is one of these Satans who encourages God to punish the devout Job to test his faith. According to some scholars, the role of the Satan is not as the cause of all evil, but as someone who provokes the advocates of good to prove themselves. And this connection between the concept of the biblical devil and legal procedure often gets overlooked, likely because legal scholars and biblical scholars work in quite distinct fields. Then again, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Satan has appeared in legal court documents in the United States not as a religious reference, but as a defendant. In 1971, for example, a prisoner in Pittsburgh's Western Penitentiary decided that the only way out of this maximum security facility was to take his grievances to the top. The 22 year old man filed a lawsuit not against the State of Pennsylvania or the judges who had put him in prison, but against the devil himself. The resulting court Case was labeled Gerald Mayo versus Satan and his staff. Mayo alleged that the devil and his agents had placed roadblocks in his way that guaranteed that he would live a miserable life. His life, he claimed, was a series of misfortunes that could only mean that he was being set up to fail. Ultimately, the judge decided to throw the case out, although not for the reason that you might expect. Instead of flatly labeling the case ludicrous and not worth hearing at all, the judge bothered to write up a procedural reason for dismissing the case. In his ruling, he determined that Gerald Mayo had filed a lawsuit that would be impossible to execute. How had he expected the court to serve legal notice to the devil himself? Moreover, the judge wrote, Mayo would have to prove that similar cases like his were universal, that others who had been targeted by the devil wound up with a similar fate. Without such examples, he could not prove to the judges that he was not responsible for the actions and decisions that had landed him in prison in the first place. So there you go. With the case dismissed, Mayo returned to prison. Now his goal for this case would never be fully clear to us for over 50 years. Perhaps he intended to get media attention that would help him get a more lenient sentence. Perhaps he wanted to serve a case so ludicrous that the court would have to hear him out. Or maybe he was just so desperate that even this action was better than none at all. And wasting the court's time was a fair way to spend his days behind bars, as any other. Idle hands are the devil's workshop, as they say. Well, whatever the real reason, this lawsuit would have a unique legacy. You see to this day, it's used by law professors to teach the necessary elements of building a case. Even in a society where lawsuits are an easy way to address your problems, Suing someone isn't just about the grievance. It also requires a target who is subject to the same laws you're using to sue. Satan, it would seem, is literally above the law. So I guess it turns out that he won't be needing that. Devil's advocate.