Amanda Knox

So I learned about George Stinney, who was 14 years old, the youngest person ever executed in the United States, who grew up in Clarendon County, South Carolina, which is probably like 45 minutes from where my little small town is.

And I'm reading the history.

Then I started digging into Furman versus Georgia, which was the landmark U.S.

Supreme Court case.

And

And I was like, whoa, the death penalty has been racist.

And they were executing people who committed crimes at the age of 16 and 17.

I became very opposed to the death penalty.

So I started like a little student group in my middle school and high school.

And if you go back to my yearbook, interestingly...

my friends would write, good luck trying to abolish the death penalty.

Like that was like the thing that they would say in my yearbook because I was so opposed.

So, but that was for me, that's what I got.

And then I saw Reverend Jesse Jackson as a younger person.

I was on fire and it was like, I'm going to go, I'm going to be a criminal defense lawyer and I'm going to go work on death penalty cases.

And so I ended up, I ended up being a part of,

the movement to abolish the juvenile death penalty like in 2005.

So for me, like that advocacy was like that thing that I couldn't unsee because I realized that like we had been fed this information about a criminal justice system.

When really, when you looked at the history of the death penalty, why the death penalty, like we went from slave codes to, you know,

the death penalty and who largely got the death penalty, largely black and brown men and women in the United States.