The New York Times
May 18, 2003

Sunday, Late Edition, Section 1; Page 37;Metropolitan Desk

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Pataki Is Asked to Pardon Lenny Bruce

 

by SUSAN SAULNY

 

Greenwich Village in the early 1960's and Lenny Bruce, the shocking social satirist of the day, seemed an ideal couple, both reveling in full countercultural bloom.

 

Bruce, widely considered the father of comic realism, had been harassed for his ribald act in other cities, yet he felt comfortable enough in his native New York to deliver unfettered his bits about sex, politics and religion. (He called one of his more popular riffs "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties.")

 

But on three occasions in Cafe au Go Go during March 1964, the authorities thought he went too far with talk about bestiality and body parts. He was arrested and, after a six-month trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, convicted on misdemeanor obscenity charges for "word crimes."

 

Those who knew Bruce well say that what happened in the courthouse at 100 Centre Street in December hastened his demise, death by drug overdose in August 1966.

 

"There's no question about it, the case killed him," said Martin Garbus, a lawyer who represented Bruce at trial. "This was a man who was destroyed by the law. He couldn't get a job. No one would touch him. It was a sad, angry time for Lenny."

 

Now, 37 years after his death, some Bruce devotees are mobilizing to help accomplish Bruce's final, unfinished task: appealing the verdict.

 

A petition is circulating and a movement is gaining momentum among performance artists and First Amendment scholars to ask Gov. George E. Pataki to issue the one thing that would clear Lenny Bruce's name today: a posthumous pardon.

 

The idea that a comic was sentenced to jail for obscenities used during his stand-up performance strikes some people as so objectionable that lobbying for a pardon "is the least we can do," said Margaret Cho, a comedian who credits Bruce with pioneering a new path for comedy away from the corny one-liners that once dominated the stage.

 

Labeled a "sick comic," he replied: "I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor."

A spokesman for Governor Pataki, Joe Conway, said that if a petition was received in Albany, Mr. Pataki would review it.

 

At the time of his death, some of Bruce's friends mourned him as a suicide victim driven to desperation while trying to appeal the guilty verdict.

 

After he was sentenced to four months on Rikers Island, a jail term he had not yet begun to serve, Bruce grew distrustful of the law and lawyers and insisted on representing himself.

 

But a good appellate lawyer he was not. Bruce wanted to build a case based on his free speech rights, showing how the First Amendment protected his comedy routines. But he goofed on technicalities and missed deadlines. And so he died a convicted man.

 

The movement to pardon Lenny Bruce is "better late than never, from my point of view," said Joan Bertin, the executive director of the Manhattan-based National Coalition Against Censorship. "Lenny Bruce was really ahead of his time, and a very substantial unfairness was done to him. For ultimately random reasons, this injustice was never righted."

 

The owner of the cafe where Bruce was performing in the Village, Howard Solomon, was also convicted of obscenity, but he successfully appealed the verdict in October 1965. Since Mr. Solomon was a co-defendant of Bruce, and was part of the Bruce case, when his conviction was overturned many people believed that Bruce, too, had been cleared.

 

"Technically, the conviction still stands," Bruce's former lawyer, Mr. Garbus, said last week.

Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, the authors of "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon" (Sourcebooks Inc., 2002), made the discovery in the process of their research.

 

"We are 2,000 percent sure of this," said Mr. Collins, a scholar in residence at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va. "We were surprised. We kept looking for some record. But there wasn't any. People assumed that because the Solomon case was reversed, the Bruce case was reversed."

 

It was not.

 

Last week, more than a half-dozen calls were made to court officials in Manhattan with access to records from the time of the conviction, and none seemed to know about or be able to locate any record of an appeal for Lenny Bruce.

 

"In the formal annals of recorded law, Lenny Bruce remains a criminal in New York State for word crimes," said Mr. Skover, a professor at Seattle University Law School.

The reverence shown Bruce today by comics who have walked in his footsteps is one indication of his legacy.

 

"We consider him like a messianic figure -- he died so we could be free," Ms. Cho said. "Not to be blasphemous, but for me to be able to say that last statement is only because of his contributions not only to comedy, but to free speech in general."

 

There were undercover police officers in the Village cafe on the nights Bruce was accused of being obscene. He apparently learned that they took notes and recounted parts of the performance for a grand jury. In one of his recorded routines, he said, "The cop did the act for the grand jury and it stunk, and I got busted."

A Brooklyn Law School professor, William E. Hellerstein, who, as a young Legal Aid lawyer, represented Mr. Solomon, called Bruce's conviction "one of the great disgraces of legal history."

 

Mr. Collins and Mr. Skover have scheduled a news conference on Tuesday to announce the pardon petition in conjunction with a New York County Lawyers Association event, "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: Free Speech or Crude Comedy?"

 

Mr. Collins, a co-petitioner with Mr. Skover, summed it us this way: "I think Lenny Bruce should be pardoned for one simple reason. What happened to him in 1964 was contrary to everything the First Amendment represents. There are a number of technical reasons, too, but that's the simple reason."

 


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