Talkleft posted the other day about a movement in New York to seek a posthumous pardon for Lenny Bruce :

Bruce, widely considered the father of comic realism, had been harassed for his ribald act in other cities, yet he felt comfortable enough in his native New York to deliver unfettered his bits about sex, politics and religion. (He called one of his more popular riffs “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties.”)

But on three occasions in Cafe au Go Go during March 1964, the authorities thought he went too far with talk about bestiality and body parts. He was arrested and, after a six-month trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, convicted on misdemeanor obscenity charges for “word crimes.”
. . .
At the time of his death, some of Bruce’s friends mourned him as a suicide victim driven to desperation while trying to appeal the guilty verdict.

After he was sentenced to four months on Rikers Island, a jail term he had not yet begun to serve, Bruce grew distrustful of the law and lawyers and insisted on representing himself.

But a good appellate lawyer he was not. Bruce wanted to build a case based on his free speech rights, showing how the First Amendment protected his comedy routines. But he goofed on technicalities and missed deadlines. And so he died a convicted man.

The movement to pardon Lenny Bruce is “better late than never, from my point of view,” said Joan Bertin, the executive director of the Manhattan-based National Coalition Against Censorship. “Lenny Bruce was really ahead of his time, and a very substantial unfairness was done to him. For ultimately random reasons, this injustice was never righted.”