News on Youtube Oct 4 2017

I have never met a rich person who has been sentenced to death

because rich people can afford good lawyers.

They hire the best lawyers and they are not sentenced to death.

They have access to resources,

to people who have influence in society,

they themselves may have status as people who have education,

who have important jobs.

Those are things that poor people don't have.

We don't know what it is like

to go to bed hungry at night,

we don't know what it is like to be sick or have a loved one sick

and not be able to take that person to the doctor

or to pay for the medications.

Here in the United States, the richest country in the world,

we have children who are hungry all the time

and that's their prevailing major memory of their childhood

is being hungry and not have enough food to eat.

We have violence, and we have drug abuse

abuse and we have terrible housing conditions,

we have lack of access to medical care,

so many things that poverty brings on these children

who then grow up to maybe make bad decisions,

maybe because of the trauma in their life react inappropriately

to stimuli to situations in which they find themselves

in trouble.

Every client I have ever represented or even come in contact with

here in the United States and all around the world,

they all have been poor.

They all have been poor.

There is no question that it is a major contributing factor

to the fact they end up on death row.

Because they come to this point so already burdened,

they have so many difficulties because of their economics status.

Because our world is...

the gap between the rich and the poor

grows larger and larger.

So, I think, you know it is again one more reason I don't think

we should be using the death penalty

when we see the effects it is having disproportionately

on people who are poor, people who are vulnerable

for so many reasons.

I think the World Coalition is right to focus on poverty

it is a unifying factor and theme around the world

in all the countries that use the death penalty.

Despite all the differences that we have country to country,

we see poor people on all of those death rows

and so I think it is a very appropriate thing to focus on.

It focuses the public's attention on.