LAWRENCVILLE -- James C. McCloskey, founder and executive director of Centurion Ministries, Inc., will present the Law and Justice Program’s 12th Annual Distinguished Award Lecture, on Tuesday, October 23, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Cavalla Room of the Bart Luedeke Center.

Open to the public, McCloskey’s lecture is entitled, “Convicting the Innocent in America.” McCloskey travels throughout the United States and Canada conducting investigations of wrongful convictions. Since its founding in 1983, Centurion Ministries has freed and exonerated 40 innocent people, all of whom have spent years under false imprisonment serving life or death sentences for crimes they did not commit.

“Mr. McCloskey’s work on behalf of the wrongly convicted is very impressive and important to our society,” said Dr. Pamela Brown, professor of communication/journalism and director of Rider’s Law and Justice Program. “He is a dynamic and engaging speaker.”

A graduate of Bucknell University, McCloskey served three years as a naval officer in Japan and Vietnam and subsequently spent 13 years in business, primarily as an executive for two different international management consulting firms after earning a post-graduate degree in international business from The American Graduate School for International Business. He left the business world for the ministry in 1979 earning a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. McCloskey officially began the work of Centurion Ministries in 1980 as a student chaplain at Trenton State Prison.

The 11 previous winners of the Distinguished Achievement Award are: Judge John J. Gibbons, Ret. federal judge; David Feige, a public defender, legal commentator and writer; Patrick Budd, director of the Mercer County Office of Central Jersey Legal Services; Joan Pennington, an attorney and founder of the Women’s Law Project; Linda Fineberg, a New Jersey Superior Court judge and a 1971 Rider graduate; Maryann Bielamowicz, a State Superior Court judge and a 1970 Rider graduate; Steven Donziger, editor of The Real War on Crime Report; Steven Hallett, a Trenton attorney, who served as president of the Trenton Chapter of the NAACP; Amnesty International USA; Lorry W. Post,  executive director of New Jerseyans for a Death Penalty Moratorium (NJDPM); and Dena Mottola, executive director of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group.