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."


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