The New York Times’s John Leland has a neat little story in today’s paper about a prosecutor apologizing to a defendant…a half-century after the prosecutor won his case.

Back then, Gerald Harris was an assistant district attorney in New York City. Jonas Mekas was a filmmaker/critic/avant-garde-movie-theater-booker/manager. Mekas showed an experimental sexytimes-filled film called Flaming Creatures at the New Bowery Theater and Harris, then 28 and prosecuting obscenity cases, had him arrested and charged.

This movie has everything! Cross-dressers! Hermaphrodites! Drag shows! Drug orgies! Flaccid penises! Sexually ambiguous vampires!

Mekas was found guilty and sentenced to 60 days in a workhouse (as Leland points out, this was “a grim punishment for a survivor of a Nazi forced labor camp”). The sentence was suspended, and Mekas went on working in film. Today, at 92, he runs Anthology Film Archives, a funky treasure around the corner from snarly’s East Village apartment.

A few months after the Mekas case, Harris asked to be excused from prosecuting Lenny Bruce for obscenity. He found Bruce funny. Harris began writing poetry. Years after Susan Sontag testified in support of Mekas, Harris met her at a poetry reading, and, Leland says, they “had a laugh about his cross-examination.”

After Harris, now 79, read Leland’s lovely profile of Mekas in the Times a couple of weeks ago, he reached out to the filmmaker. Leland’s account:

“I feel I owe you an apology,” Mr. Harris wrote in an email. “Although my appreciation of free expression and aversion to censorship developed more fully as I matured, I should have sooner acted more courageously.”

Mr. Mekas wrote back immediately.

“Your surprise generous apology accepted!” he wrote. “There should be more such examples.”

The moral: It’s never too late to apologize. (Your apology may be accepted and it may not be. It’s still good to reach out.) Mekas tells Leland he’s now considering asking Harris to do some pro bono work for Anthology Film Archives. “That would be one way of atoning,” he points out.

True. But Harris needn’t do any more than he has. He apologized for doing his job, a job he came to realize he wasn’t suited for. He’s earned his retirement (he became a county attorney and judge in Westchester). He’s been a mensch. If he chooses to help Mekas, he shouldn’t do more work than he feels comfortable doing; his act of decency shouldn’t lead to feelings of resentfulness or put-upon-ness this late in the game.