Lindy Lou Isonhood grew up in a town where the death penalty was a fact of life, part of the unspoken culture. But after she served as a juror in a capital murder trial -- and voted "yes" to sentencing a guilty man to death -- something inside her changed. In this engaging and personal talk, Isonhood reflects on the question she's been asking he...

What happens before a murder? In looking for ways to reduce death penalty cases, David R. Dow realized that a surprising number of death row inmates had similar biographies. In this talk he proposes a bold plan, one that prevents murders in the first place.

David R. Dow has defended over 100 death row inmates in 20 years.

Three men were killed by lethal injection in the United States within a 24-hour period last week. That’s right, the industrial prison complex roared back into action after a botched execution in Oklahoma in April led some people to ask pressing questions that temporarily put a halt on the American system’s killing of its own citizens. Those ques...

Erricka Bridgeford intimately engages with issues related to murder and violence.

We’ve been on break but the TED community definitely hasn’t -- here are some highlights from the past few weeks. Black Panther’s Shuri stars in her own comic. Writer Nnedi Okorafor will team up with visual artist Leonardo Romero to bring Marvel’s newest Black Panther comic series to life. Shuri will follow Wakandan princess and tech geniu...

In session 3 of TEDWomen 2018, hosted by social justice documentarian Jess Search, a lineup of speakers and performers -- Eldra Jackson III, Shad Begum, Emily Quinn, Shohini Ghose, Climbing PoeTree, Maeve Higgins and Lindy Lou Isonhood -- explored toxic masculinity, quantum computing, immigration, the death penalty and much more. An e...

British lawyer Alexander McLean's fascination with issues of inequality began at a young age. At 9, he was reading about the Civil Rights movement and the death penalty, fascinated by the power of the law to inflict punishment as well as deal out justice. At 18, he traveled to Uganda to volunteer as a hospice worker, where he saw that while ...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Bryan Stevenson spends most of his time in jails and prisons and on death row. He's a lawyer, and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. So he's found it very energizing at TED, and wanted to start by pointing out that there is a distinct identity here. Things said here have a power that maybe they do...

Adrianne Haslet-Davis performs the rumba at the end of Hugh Herr’s talk, “The new bionics that let us run, climb, dance.” Normally, this would not be a big deal for a professional ballroom dance teacher. But Haslet-Davis lost her left foot in the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. This rumba was her first public performance since the att...

"When police officers, acting in their duty as government officials and the enforcers of our laws, when they kill someone, that’s the death penalty." There has been a lot of heated rhetoric around the decisions of two separate American grand juries not to indict white police officers responsible for the deaths of unarmed black men. But in descr...

About this event: Over 200 International Baccalaureate students (grades 11 and 12) from as far afield as Shanghai, Florida, and Nova Scotia gathered with over 100 adults at The York School in Toronto, Canada to experience 23 amazing speakers, including 11 students, 3 poets, as well as 6 musical acts, and 11 TEDTalks. The audience was blown away by student poet, ...

The TED community has been busy as usual this week. Below, some newsy highlights. On the ground in Baltimore. Last Monday night, Paul Lewis used Twitter’s live video app, Periscope, to document the demonstrations and riots that erupted after Freddie Gray’s funeral in Baltimore. In a series of videos, he interviewed residents of the city, in...

In courtrooms, eyewitness testimony is considered extremely powerful. But should it be? At TEDxUSC, forensic psychologist Scott Fraser explains why, even when witnesses feel sure they are telling a true story, or making the right identification, their minds could be playing tricks on them -- filling in blanks in traumatic memories with erroneo...

Can a bird that symbolizes death help the living catch criminals? In this informative and accessible talk, forensic anthropologist Lauren Pharr shows us how vultures impact crime scenes -- and the assistance they can provide to detectives investigating murders. (This talk contains graphic images.)

Sam Richards, whose "Radical Experiment in Empathy" prompted a lively conversation all last week, sat in on TED Conversations today for two hours to answer questions about how to find empathy for people unlike us, and how we might prejudge someone -- even a TED speaker ... The conversation was thoughtful, honest and deeply optimistic. Thanks...

In 1989, children younger than 16 could be sentenced to die in the United States. Lawyer Bryan Stevenson (TED Talk: We need to talk about an injustice) represented some of these juveniles in Alabama, the state with the most children sentenced to death per capita. Read his chilling account of meeting Charlie, a 14-year-old tried as an adult for c...

Robert Sapolsky is "your basic confused human when it comes to violence." He's for gun control but loves shooting people in laser tag. He doesn't believe in the death penalty but has specific fantasies about how he would kill Hitler. He's also a neuroscientist who studies stress and its effects in primates. So, naturally, he wanted to figure...

Francesca Fedeli had a hard pregnancy. But she and her husband, Roberto D’Angelo, thought they were in the clear when their son, Mario, was born in January 2011 and seemed healthy. However, just 10 days later, Mario was diagnosed as having had a perinatal stroke. The right side of his brain was damaged, leaving him unable to move the left si...

Day 3 at TED2014 was dense with science, design, conversation. Here's a quick recap of some highlights: Hugh Herr and Adrianne Haslet-Davis's surprise dance Hugh Herr is a bionics designer and multiple amputee. He gave a talk that was half mind-blowing -- full of extraordinary advances in prosthetics, like bionic designs that produce t...

“The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows,” says Shereen El Feki in her talk from TEDGlobal 2013. “That is true for all of us, no matter where we live and love.” For five years, El Feki talked to people across Middle East about their bedroom behavior, and what she found over and over was a seemingly deep-rooted conservatism -- in ...

Turn it into a game, says technologist Esra’a Al Shafei. Thanks to features like a point system and a leaderboard, her small site for LGBTQ people in the Arab world is not only fun to use -- it’s free from harassers. Many LGBTQ people in the Middle East live under a cloud of stress and fear -- depending on where they live, they may face social ...

Over the course of 25 years, folk rock icons Indigo Girls -- Amy Ray and Emily Saliers -- have not only released more than a dozen albums, they have also displayed a deep dedication to social, political and environmental issues, mixing music and activism in equal parts. In 1993, they co-founded Honor the Earth, the Native American support and...

TED University is the raucous session before “real TED” starts when attendees get up and give their own short talks. (Some of our very favorite TED Talks came from this session, like talks on Lego, sex, and 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.) This morning at a cheerful 9am, we met the next class of professors. A brief recap: ...

Researchers have identified many things -- like unpredictable laughter, pale skin, unkempt hair -- that people tend to find unsettling in others. But they’ve also realized this: We humans are pretty poor judges of who we should trust, says psychologist Julia Shaw. We sometimes use terms that ascribe negative traits to people we don’t know. Tha...

Neutrality isn't an option when it comes to the fight for personal and political freedom, says world-trotting journalist Christiane Amanpour. Offering context on some of the most significant stories impacting the world today, Amanpour details her experience covering the women-led protests ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran and shares in...

By Liz Jacobs and Ben Lillie Taking stock of our moment in history helps us better understand ourselves, our societies and the present moment itself  -- which often gets lost in the temptation to look backwards or forwards. And at TED2014: The Next Chapter we're doing plenty of both. But we're also designating this All-Stars session to th...

African prison activist

At TED2012, lawyer Bryan Stevenson made an impassioned case for confronting racial and economic injustice in the American justice system. And, he argued, confronting that means changing the way the system approaches child offenders. In his talk he says: "I represent children. A lot of my clients are very young. The United States is the only coun...

Zak Ebrahim is the son of a terrorist. Phyllis Rodriguez lost her son on 9/11. In an inspiring conversation, the two share their personal histories of lives devastated by violence -- and rebuilt by tolerance. Zak Ebrahim’s father was convicted of plotting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Phyllis Rodriguez’s son, Greg, worked in t...