Stephen Bright, teaching Yale's course on Capital Punishment, Race, Poverty, and Disadvantage, examines how innocent people end up sentenced to death and sometimes executed. He walks through cases of death row exonerations and reviews the factors, including mistaken eyewitness testimony, false confessions, unreliable forensic evidence, and inadequate defense counsel, that lead juries to convict the wrong person. Bright also discusses cases where serious doubts about guilt surfaced only after execution, using them to test how the system catches or fails to catch these errors. The segment is part of a longer class session that later turns to clemency and execution methods, but this portion stays focused on wrongful conviction itself. Drawing on legal records and documented exoneration cases, Bright builds an argument about the death penalty's vulnerability to irreversible mistakes.