“For an election season that has been punctuated by the newest bipartisan buzz phrase—’criminal justice reform’—yet has featured almost no discussion of the death penalty, this moment was both electric and long overdue. ‘The audience was quiet and could hear pin drop, they were mesmerized,’ Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, told Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. When Clinton responded to Jackson by repeating her support for the death penalty, albeit a ‘very limited use of it,’ the exchange crystallized into something more than interesting or noteworthy. It became iconic: one of those rare election moments that endures long after the last votes have been counted. Tweets poured in, followed by articles, and for an all-too-brief moment, the fact that the United States continues to engage in state-sponsored killings—and that hundreds of innocent Americans have been sentenced to die—was the subject of serious campaign conversation.”