The University of Tennessee at Martin’s 22nd annual Civil Rights Conference will feature a keynote address from Cyntoia Brown-Long at 6 p.m., Feb. 7, in the Boling University Center’s Watkins Auditorium. Brown-Long is an advocate for criminal justice reform and the ending of human trafficking. She will be accompanied by her attorneys, Charles Bone and J. Houston Gordon, a graduate of UT Martin.
At the age of 16, she was sentenced to life for killing a man in self-defense. Fifteen years later, former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam granted her clemency and called her circumstance a “tragic and complex case.” She is now using her platform to educate others about criminal justice reform.
During her visit to the UT Martin campus, she will participate in a virtual session with a documentary film class and hold a Q&A session with mass media and strategic communications students. Brown-Long, Bone and Gordon will also be guest lecturers in the introduction to criminal justice class. She will share about the experience she had with the criminal justice system, and her attorneys will give their perspectives.
A book signing will be held in Watkins Auditorium following the keynote address.
For more information, please contact Anthony Prewitt, co-interim director for student life and multicultural affairs, at aprewitt@utm.edu.
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