On Thursday, Oct. 4, writer and human rights activist Scott Christianson will give a lecture at Manhattanville College, in Purchase, that will discuss and critique capital punishment and the criminal justice system.
Capital punishment and New York State parted ways in 2008, when then-Gov. Paterson ordered the closing of the state’s death row (courts had already determined the death penalty did not square with New York’s constitution). But the death penalty remains in effect in most of the rest of the country. According to Amnesty International, 15 people are scheduled to be executed between Sept. 20 and the end of the year. Nine of those executions, barring appeals or pardons, will take place in Texas.
Christianson’s talk, the 14th annual Henry Schwarzschild Memorial Lecture, will be co-sponsored by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action.
The event will include a performance by Goldee Greene of part of “Sugarwoman,” a musical Greene developed about Helen Fowler, who was executed at Sing Sing, in Ossining, in 1944.
The talk begins at 7 p.m. at Reid Castle and is free and open to the public.
