New York City's feisty mayor has censored so many so often that an Albemarle County-based center for First Amendment rights has awarded him its first-ever Lifetime Muzzle Award, officials there said Monday"

'During his tenure as mayor, [Rudolph Giuliani] has stifled free expression to such an unprecedented degree that we felt he deserved special recognition,' said Josh Wheeler, an attorney with the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression"

Every year on Thomas Jefferson's April 13 birthday, the center presents the questionable awards to those who, in the opinion of its Board of Trustees, deserve censure for censoring. This year's winners also include Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and the Louisiana Supreme Court"

This year the center presented 12 awards - the highest number ever - a fact for which officials at the center blame the rising tide of censorship in public schools"

The winners will receive T-shirts with the text of the First Amendment printed on the back and a huge pair of zipped-up lips on the front, Wheeler said"

Giuliani already won a regular Muzzle Award last year for directing the city's transit authority to remove New York Magazine's ads that read, 'Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for'"

But the New York mayor's Lifetime Award is a first"

Wheeler said it is not yet clear whether the Lifetime Award will be handed out every year"

'It will depend if there's a deserving recipient every year,' he said"

Giuliani's sins, according to the Center for the Protection of Free Expression, include refusing to allow a group of taxi drivers to assemble and protest against proposed city pick-up and drop-off rules, imposing strict licensing rules on sidewalk artists, imposing a daily $45 permit fee on street musicians and forbidding city employees to talk to reporters without specific approval"

'He has stifled speech and press to so unprecedented a degree, and in so many and varied forms, that simply keeping up with the city's censorious activity has proved a challenge for defenders of free expression,' officials with the center said in a prepared statement"

In the late 1990s, the American Civil Liberties Union has brought 12 First Amendment suits against the mayor and the city, and has won all but one, officials said"

Giuliani's office did not return phone calls asking for comment Monday" (Maria Sanminiatelli, The Daily Progress, April 13, 1999).