Newsday
June 12, 2003

 

Pardon Lenny Bruce

by Ronald K.L. Collins & Robert Corn-Revere

 

Ronald Collins is the co-author (with David Skover) of The Trials of Lenny Bruce (Sourcebooks, 2002) and the lead petitioner in the campaign to pardon Lenny Bruce. Robert Corn-Revere, a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, wrote the pardon petition and filed it with Gov. Pataki..


Word crimes. The very idea seems foreign to us. Take, for example, the four Chinese students who were recently sentenced to eight years in prison by the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court. Their crime: “subverting state power” by openly discussing alternative political views and posting such ideas on the Internet.


We take comfort in the belief that this could never happen in America. Or could it? Something of the kind did occur in 1964, in New York. And there’s a campaign afoot to rectify that wrong and prevent similar wrongs from reoccurring.


Last month several noted lawyers and scholars (including Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe) joined prominent celebrities (including Robin Williams and Penn & Teller) to publicly support a petition asking Governor George Patakai to posthumously pardon America’s most legendary and offensive comedian, Lenny Bruce (1925-66). The 25-page petition documents how in 1964 Bruce was relentlessly prosecuted for a Village-nightclub performance before enthusiastically consenting adults. The bizarre trial in which Bruce and the owners of the nightclub were tried spanned six months. The comedian was convicted and sentenced to a term at Rikers Island.


Lenny Bruce burst onto the American scene when most comedians traded in mother-in-law jokes. He did colorful and irreverent riffs on life, law, language, politics, religion, and sex. Bruce ripped into hypocrites like a furious buzz-saw veering in every philosophical direction. He lampooned popes, preachers, politicians, and judges. He wanted to expose “the lie” in life – all of those respectable cover-ups used to hide the dirty truth. His words – comical, critical, and profane – put America’s First-Amendment principle to the test: can offensive speech really be free?


Thirty-nine years ago New York failed that test when it convicted Lenny Bruce. The comedian tried unsuccessfully to handle his own appeal and failed. His appeal was dismissed. Some time afterwards he died of a drug overdose. Two years later the obscenity conviction of his co-defendant (the nightclub owner) was reversed. Hence, had Bruce successfully processed his appeal, his conviction would also have been reversed.


People v. Lenny Bruce remains on the books. It is a sobering example of what can go horribly wrong when citizens and others are persecuted for word crimes – for speaking their minds in their own way and by the light of their own reason. Looking back on the case in 1974, Robert Morgenthau, the current District Attorney, was openly critical of the “harshness with which [the Bruce case] was tried. It was a case, he added, that was tried “against the advice of the obscenity experts in the [prosecutor’s] office, who [argued] there was no case.” In other words, it was an abuse of process. The system failed; the First Amendment was abridged.

There is ample legal room and equitable reason for Gov. Patakai to right this wrong and posthumously pardon Lenny Bruce. By doing so he could set the historical record straight. Such a pardon would be more than an important symbolic statement. For it would represent a real and robust commitment to change the wrongs of the past by respecting the rights of the living, of the Lenny Bruces of today and tomorrow. The history of social entertainment – dating back before the time of the Greek-comic poet Aristophanes – is a record of performers taking creative chances with “acceptable” norms of communicative behavior. When we deny them that opportunity to experiment, to test the waters of the acceptable, we become what we fear, namely, something akin to a Beijing tribunal.

 

Admittedly, Lenny Bruce used blue words in his nightclub routines. But if truth be known, it was what Bruce said more than the profane way he put it that brought the force of the law down on him. And that is precisely the problem. If any law can be tapped to persecute people for what they think, then our entire system of freedom of expression can be sabotaged. As Justice Louis Brandeis aptly put it in 1927: the “freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”

 

It is antithetical to the American creed of freedom to be told by public officials to “watch what we say.” However we may feel about controversial entertainers -- a Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Margaret Cho or a Bill Maher -- they have the right to be heard, to have their views tested and contested in the public forum. That idea, of course, is foreign to the way they do things in Beijing.

 

New York is one of the world’s great capitals of artistic expression. It is therefore fitting that it should stand firm in its commitment to artistic freedom and in its opposition to censorship born in a fear of the unorthodox. By posthumously pardoning Lenny Bruce, the State of New York declares to the world that it is a safe harbor of liberty for creative minds of all viewpoints.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.


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