LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Lenny Bruce: Courts
built 288 days ago
Constantly harassed by both the police and the courts, Bruce became obsessed with the minutiae of his legal proceedings, and much of his later act consisted of him analyzing transcripts of his trials. He wrote a series of autobiographical articles from 1963 to 1965 for Playboy magazine. Those articles were eventually published as How To Talk Dirty and Influence People (1965). He was arrested several times for drug possession during the 1960s and died of an overdose in 1966.
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Bruce was a tireless defender of free speech and the First Amendment, Collins says. Bruce ... was also an amateur lawyer who tried to defend himself in court and paid heavily for defying authority.
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Lenny kept trying. And it became more like "The Trial" where there is a verdict of "ostensible acquittal" under which, the accused is told, it is possible "for the acquitted man to go straight home from the Court and find officers already waiting to arrest him again . . . the case begins all over again, but again, it is possible to secure an ostensible acquittal. One must again apply all one's energies to the case and never give in."
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Lenny was arrested more than a dozen times and was banned in London and Chicago for being obscene. He stood in front of Thurgood Marshall before he was named to the Supreme Court, with Marshall throwing the book at him.
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Although Lenny was convicted in 1962, he never relinquished his faith—his obsessive faith—in the First Amendment. He was certain that a higher court would liberate him from the police and prosecutors who pursued him like an army of Inspector Javerts.
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