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 owner of the cafe where Bruce was performing in the Village, Howard Solomon, was also convicted of obscenity, but he successfully appealed the verdict in October 1965. Since Mr. Solomon was a co-defendant of Bruce, and was part of the Bruce case, when his conviction was overturned many people believed that Bruce, too, had been cleared.

...A Brooklyn Law School professor, William E. Hellerstein, who, as a young Legal Aid lawyer, represented Mr. Solomon, called Bruce's conviction "one of the great disgraces of legal history."

We support the petition drive. We think it is a noble gesture. We were too young to have seen Bruce perform live, but we always felt like we knew him through one of his lines, which we first saw on a plaque hanging in a Denver lawyer's office in the '70's. It said, "The only justice in the halls of justice is in the halls."

To this day, whenever we walk though a courthouse in a major metropolitan area and see the hushed or angry conversations taking place around the courtroom doors between lawyer and client, discussing a plea bargain that needs an answer in five minutes, we think of Mr. Bruce and that line. Cases really are resolved in the halls--sometimes justly, sometimes not.

It's time for justice for Mr. Bruce.

[P.S. The real line as Bruce said it is, "In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls." Our lawyer friend's plaque didn't get it quite right, but it's the version we know so we're sticking with it.]