Stephen Bright, teaching Yale's course on Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, and Disadvantage, examines the executive power of clemency in death penalty cases. The segment covers how governors and other executives can commute a death sentence to life imprisonment or another punishment, and what factors typically drive that decision, from claims of innocence to questions of fairness in the original trial. Bright places clemency within the broader machinery of capital punishment, treating it as a final, discretionary check on a system he has spent the course showing to be shaped by race and poverty. Drawing on class readings tied to the session, the lecture builds a focused legal picture of how mercy operates, or fails to operate, at the last stage of a capital case.