Bryan Stevenson is a public interest lawyer, the founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He talks about the alarming statistic of innocent people wrongly executed on death row.
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That for every eight people executed in this country, uh, we've identified one innocent person on death row. It's a shocking rate.
0:06 – 0:10
Audience disbelief and confirming the number
SPSpeaker
One in eight?
BSBryan Stevenson
One in eight. And-
SPSpeaker
No.
0:10 – 0:40
Airplane-crash analogy: why we’d never accept this error elsewhere
BSBryan Stevenson
We would not tolerate that kind of error for aircraft. If every, if one out of eight planes crashed and everyone would die, we would stop flying. This data is not really in dispute, but we continue executing people in this country because of our history of racial inequality, of, uh, disfavoring the poor. We just don't value the suffering of all people equally, and that problem of valuing the suffering of some people less than the suffering of
0:40 – 0:56
Why executions continue: inequality, poverty, and devalued suffering
BSBryan Stevenson
other people just makes us indifferent to the problems of unreliable prosecution, erroneous prosecution. Most people think, "Well, yeah, we probably do have some innocent people on death row," or, "Yeah, we probably do have a lot of innocent people in jails and prisons, but that will never happen to me."
Episode duration: 0:56
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