Last Exit To Brooklyn - Trial

Trial

The rights for the British edition were acquired by Marion Boyars and John Calder and the novel ended up in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The manuscript was published in January 1966, received positive reviews and sold almost 14,000 copies. The director of Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford complained to the DPP about the detailed depictions of brutality and cruelty in the book but the DPP did not pursue the allegations.

Sir Cyril Black, the then Conservative Member of Parliament for Wimbledon, initiated a private prosecution of the novel before Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court. The public prosecutor brought an action under Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act. During the hearing the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate ordered that all copies of the book within the Magistrate's Court be seized. Not a single bookseller possessed a copy, but the publishing offices of Calder and Boyars, within the Bow Street Magistrate's jurisdiction, were discovered to be in possession of three copies. The books were duly seized, and Mrs. Boyars was summonsed to show cause why "the said articles" should not be forfeited. Expert witnesses spoke, "unprecedentedly," for the prosecution: they included the publishers Sir Basil Blackwell and Robert Maxwell. On the defense side were the scholars Al Alvarez II, and professor Frank Kermode, who had previously compared the work to Dickens. Others who provided rebuttal evidence included H. Montgomery Hyde.

The order had no effect beyond the borders of the Marlborough Street Court — the London neighborhood of Soho. At the hearing Calder declared that the book would continue to be published and would be sold everywhere else outside of that jurisdiction. In response the prosecutor brought criminal charges under Section 2 of the Act, which entitled the defendants to trial by jury under Section 4.

The jury was all male. Judge Graham Rigers directed that the women "might be embarrassed at having to read a book which dealt with homosexuality, prostitution, drug-taking and sexual perversion." The trial lasted nine days; on November 23 the jury returned a guilty verdict.

In 1968, an appeal issued by the lawyer and writer John Mortimer resulted in a judgment by Mr Justice Lane which reversed the ruling. The case marked a turning point in British censorship laws. By that time, the novel had sold over 33,000 hardback and 500,000 paperback copies in the United States.