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RedditFloyd Abrams, Laurence Tribe, Robin Williams, Margaret Cho, Martin Garbus and others are supporting a petition asking New York State Governor George Pataki to pardon legendary comedian Lenny Bruce (1925-66) posthumously. The petition documents how Bruce was prosecuted in 1964 for obscenities uttered in a Greenwich Village nightclub performance and, after a six-month trial, convicted and sentenced to a term on Rikers Island. He subsequently died of a drug overdose with the conviction still on the books. In 1968 the obscenity conviction of Bruce's co-defendant, the nightclub owner, was reversed, strongly suggesting that Bruce's conviction would have been reversed, too. To lend support to the pardon effort, go to www.trialsoflennybruce.com/pardon.htm.
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