Pataki pardons Bruce posthumously
Williams, Skover, others pushed for action
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Pataki hailed the pardon as "a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting for as we continue to wage the war on terror."
Defenders of the First Amendment welcomed the pardon, which came after pressure from Robin Williams, the Smothers Brothers and Penn & Teller as well as a six-month national petition drive spearheaded by Seattle U. law professor David Skover, author of "The Trials of Lenny Bruce."
But the unusual move by Pataki -- Bruce's was the first posthumous pardon in New York state history -- also struck some as a timely reminder of just how far the fault lines of the First Amendment have shifted from the moral standards of the 1960s to contemporary matters of privacy and political discourse.
"I'm not sure how his pardon affects the obvious overkill of the Patriot Act and homeland security," said producer Robert Greenwald, co-editor with Danny Goldberg and Victor Goldberg of "It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11."
Bruce, who died in 1966 at the age of 40, never served a jail sentence for the 1964 conviction. He lost the case after firing his lawyers and arguing his own defense. But the case remains one of the watershed obscenity trials of the early '60s, a time when censorship battles over books by Henry Miller, William Burroughs and D.H. Lawrence were carried to the Supreme Court and eventually overturned.
"Today the issue isn't sexual, the issue is political," said Martin Garbus, a longtime First Amendment crusader who was one of Bruce's original attorneys in the 1964 case. Garbus said many of the threats to free speech today involve large corporations and the media, citing as an example the recent cancellation by CBS of its Ronald Reagan miniseries.
Bruce's conviction was the result of a monologue at the Cafe au Go Go in New York, in which he was reported to have used more than 100 "obscene" words, including graphic descriptions of oral sex. The last few years of Bruce's life were largely consumed by his legal quandaries and mounting debts.
"There's no question about it, the case killed him," Garbus told the New York Times last May. "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."
