Andrea Lyon, the attorney for accused child murderer Casey Anthony, was invited on Thursday's Today show to discuss the case and promote her new book and was given a platform to call the death penalty "A barbaric institution," and to spout that the U.S. is in the "company of Iraq and Iran and China."

NBC's Meredith Vieira conducted the live interview with Lyon but not before Kerry Sanders set the table in a story accompanied by a headline that championed: "Angel of Death Row, Casey Anthony's Lawyer Takes On The System." In his piece Sanders touted: "The once tie-dyed idealist from the '60s has one agenda: preventing any one from ever being executed." Near the end of Vieira's in-studio interview with Lyon the Today co-anchor prompted the attorney to criticize capital punishment, as seen in the following exchange: