Stephen Bright, teaching Yale's course on Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, and Disadvantage, examines one of the most consequential questions in death penalty trials: whether a jury can reliably predict that a defendant will be dangerous in the future. He walks through the kinds of evidence prosecutors introduce to support a finding of future dangerousness, including expert testimony and institutional records, and questions how accurate these predictions actually turn out to be once tested against real outcomes. The lecture also covers the defense side, looking at how attorneys attempt to rebut the state's case, from presenting evidence of good behavior in custody to challenging the scientific basis of dangerousness predictions altogether. Bright draws on his own experience litigating capital cases to show how this single jury determination can decide whether a defendant lives or dies, making the reliability of the underlying evidence a matter of life and death rather than an abstract legal technicality.