Category: Events

In his address, “The Promise of Africa,” President Mahama will discuss recent and current growth and development on the African continent and the need for the international community to support and encourage these new development achievements. He will highlight Ghana’s efforts to attain economic growth and reduce poverty in charting a sustainable course as a stable middle-income country.

Tickets are required to attend the talk and are available at the Shapiro Campus Center box office during the following hours: Monday-Friday, 12-6 p.m. and Saturday 12-4 p.m. The box office will be closed Sept. 25-28 for Rosh Hashanah. Tickets are limited and are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. One ticket will be issued per Brandeis ID.

Please note that security measures will be in place. No bags, cameras, video cameras, or signs or banners will be allowed in the theater. The Secret Service may also implement other restrictions. Doors will open at 12 noon.

The Heller School for Social Policy and Management’s Sustainable International Development program is sponsoring President Mahama’s talk as part of its 20th anniversary celebration. President Mahama will also meet with President Frederick M. Lawrence and attend a lunch with faculty, staff and students.

Dead Men Still Walking: A First Hand Account of Death Row by Death Penalty Activist Sister Helen Prejean

Thursday, February 6, 2014, 7p.m.

Levin Ballroom

What’s it like to be sentenced to death—for a crime you did not commit?

Sister Helen Prejean—perhaps the most famous Roman Catholic nun in the U.S.—knows better than most. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates for more than 25 years, she’s also America’s most famous advocate for ending the death penalty.

In 1982, Sister Helen unexpectedly became the spiritual adviser to death row inmate Patrick Sonnier, convicted of killing two teenagers, who had been sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. Witnessing his execution prompted her to write the bestselling Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States (Random House, 1993), which became a movie for which Susan Sarandon won the Oscar for playing Sister Helen—and sparking a nationwide debate over the death penalty’s injustice.

Sister Helen says that 80 percent of those on death row live in the ten Southern states that practiced slavery, and that 80 percent of those executed are poor people who kill white people. “When people of color get killed in this country, it doesn’t even hit the radar screen in district attorneys’ offices,” she says.

Sister Helen is an electrifying speaker, whose paired sense of humor and sense of moral urgency make it clear why her work has helped transform American attitudes and laws. Her gripping talk at Brandeis’s Spingold Theater in 2006 was standing room only. The rare opportunity to hear her, live and in person, is not to be missed. Please join us as Sister Helen talks about the true costs of death row.

Sponsored by the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Peace and Coexistence Studies and Sociology Department

Contact person and email: Liz Eckley, lizm10@brandeis.edu, x63873