Stephen Bright teaches this session of his Yale course on capital punishment, focusing on the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp. The lecture walks through the Court's 5-4 rejection of a constitutional challenge to racial disparities in Georgia's death penalty system, despite statistical studies documenting those disparities, and examines the reasoning of the four dissenting justices. Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, discusses the decision's legacy for criminal justice, and North Carolina lawyer Henderson Hill describes a state court's findings of racial discrimination under North Carolina's Racial Justice Act and that law's rapid repeal once discrimination was proven. The class traces how courts have handled discrimination claims in death penalty cases since McCleskey, treating the decision as a turning point that closed off statistical evidence as a path to relief. It is a case-focused legal analysis, not an advocacy presentation.