ACQUITTED. Jerry Lee Lewis, 49, renegade rockabilly singer who has had numerous brushes with the law over the years; of federal income tax evasion; in Memphis. He was indicted last February for concealing income from 1975 to 1980. But his lawyer successfully argued that with Lewis' sixth-grade education, he was incompetent to handle his own finances. Despite the acquittal, Lewis still owes the IRS $653,000.

DIED. Jon-Erik Hexum, 26, actor and model who was starring in the new TV series Cover Up until he shot himself in the temple two weeks ago with a blank-loaded .44-cal. Magnum pistol while playing "Russian roulette"; of brain damage; in San Francisco. After a week's struggle to save his life, doctors pronounced him brain dead, and his heart, kidneys and corneas were used for transplants. The show will go on; a search for Hexum's replacement has already started.

DIED. Martin Ryle, 66, British astrophysicist who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics for his development of radio astronomy techniques that extended mankind's reach 6 billion miles into the universe and led to the discovery of such intense, distant radio sources as pulsars and quasars; of pneumonia; in Cambridge, England. His major discovery, aperture synthesis, provided a method of focusing many small, separate radio antennas to fill in the gaps in broad-band radio waves, allowing astronomers to record tiny details, equivalent in terms of optical telescopes to reading a postage stamp on the moon.

DIED. Alice Neel, 84, unconventional expressionist painter who specialized in representational but psychologically revealing portraits (including an occasional TIME cover: Feminist Kate Millett, 1970, Franklin Roosevelt, 1982) of cancer; in New York City. Neel starved during the Depression but eventually partook of the New Deal's WPA assistance. Long submerged in the tide of abstract expressionism, she was rediscovered in the late 1960s, and following a 1974 retrospective at New York City's Whitney Museum had numerous one-woman and group shows.

DIED. Alberta Hunter, 89, tiny, mellow-voiced blues singer and cabaret artist who in the 1920s became a star of low-life Chicago bars and in the 1930s of Europe's nightspots, then enjoyed a second successful singing career in her 80s; in New York City. She performed with Jazz Age greats like Louis Armstrong, and wrote her own numbers, including Down Hearted Blues, made famous by Bessie Smith. After her mother's death in 1954, she abruptly stopped singing and became a practical nurse until forced to retire by hospital administrators who thought she was 70; she was 82. Rediscovered then at a party, she performed to capacity audiences at a New York City cafe until last summer.