Stephen Bright, teaching Yale's course on capital punishment, race, poverty, and disadvantage, walks through the case of Rickey Ray Rector, a Black man executed in Arkansas despite severe mental impairment. Rector had shot himself in the head after his crime, leaving him with brain damage so profound that he reportedly saved dessert from his last meal to eat after his execution. Bright traces how Rector's clemency application was denied while Bill Clinton, then Arkansas governor, was campaigning for president, with the timing falling shortly before the New Hampshire primary. The lecture uses the case to examine how mental illness is weighed, or ignored, in capital proceedings, and how electoral politics can shape a governor's decisions on clemency. It is presented as an illustrative case within a broader course on how race and poverty intersect with the administration of the death penalty.