Wilkes University will celebrate Constitution Day on Thursday by hosting a lecture by local attorney Al Flora Jr. Entitled  “Gideon’s Trumpet and the Constitutional Right to Counsel: Has Justice Failed the Poor?”, the lecture will take place at 11 a.m. in Breiseth 107. Flora is a private-practice attorney who has worked in northeast Pennsylvania for 37 years. In that time, he has argued appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court and handled over 2,000 criminal cases.

Flora has received national attention for his high-profile cases in the region. Among those he represented are George Banks, who killed 13 people in 1982, and Mark Ciavarella, Jr., who was charged with bribery and extortion as a Pennsylvania state juvenile court judge in the “Kids for Cash” scandal.

Constitution Day is a federal observance that commemorates the implementation of the United States Constitution on Sept. 17, 1786. It was this day that representatives from the Constitutional Convention, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, signed the document in Philadelphia.

For more information on the lecture, contact Kyle Kreider, associate professor and chair of political science, at [email protected].