The New York Times
January 11, 2004
FOLLOWING UP: For Bruce's Prosecutor, 4-Letter Word
Is Duty
By Joseph P. Fried
In a half-century as a lawyer, Richard H. Kuh has been involved in some big
cases. Recently, one of them splashed back into the headlines all the way
from the 1960's.
Mr. Kuh, who was then an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, was the
prosecutor who won the controversial conviction of Lenny Bruce on obscenity
charges. The case, in 1964, was based on the comedian's act at a Greenwich
Village nightclub in which, as usual, he had couched his sharp social satire
in sexually and anatomically graphic language.
Last month, Gov. George E. Pataki pardoned Mr. Bruce, who died of a morphine
overdose in 1966.
Critics of the prosecution have called it a violation of an iconoclast's First
Amendment rights for having used language that is commonplace in entertainment
today and hardly grist anymore for prosecution mills. They have accused Mr.
Kuh, shown above in a 1985 photo, of using the case to advance an ambition
to become the district attorney.
Last week, Mr. Kuh, 82, speaking from his law office in Manhattan, agreed
with the critics that Mr. Bruce's monologues would not be a target of prosecution
these days. "Contemporary standards have changed radically," he
said.
But in 1964, he said, "we had a state obscenity statute," and it
was the function of the district attorney's office "to live by and enforce
the statute."
He rejected "any suggestion that political ambition was a factor"
in his role in the case. This, Mr. Kuh maintained, was shown by his having
left the prosecutor's office shortly after Mr. Bruce was convicted. He did
return a decade later as district attorney, when he was appointed to fill
a vacancy in early 1974. He lost when he sought election to the post later
that year.
Of Mr. Bruce's pardon, "I would just as soon not get involved in that,"
Mr. Kuh said.
"I've handled many cases," he said of his long career, "some
that got attention, some that didn't."
In one that did, in the 1980's, Sunny von Bulow's relatives hired Mr. Kuh,
then in private practice, after she fell into a coma in Newport, R.I. Evidence
that Mr. Kuh gathered helped generate the prosecution of her husband, Claus
von Bulow, on charges of trying to kill her with insulin injections. Mr. von
Bulow was acquitted in a second trial after his conviction in the first was
overturned.
These days, Mr. Kuh said, he is less active as a lawyer. "At 82,"
he said, "I'm not prepared to work night and day."