Yale law professor Stephen Bright opens his course Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, and Disadvantage by laying out the issues the semester will cover and placing capital punishment in historical context. He examines the 1992 execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a black Arkansas man with serious mental deficiencies whose clemency application was denied by then-governor Bill Clinton, using the case to introduce recurring themes of race, mental illness, and political pressure in death penalty cases. Bright traces the history connecting slavery, lynching, and convict leasing to the modern criminal courts. Historian Gilbert King, drawing on his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove, then recounts the 1949 Groveland Boys case, in which four young black men in Florida were defended by Thurgood Marshall and NAACP lawyers, illustrating the account with photographs of the trial's participants.