To Shoot or Not to Shoot

From the chambers of Superior Court Judge Paul Nourse, a Los Angeles Herald & Express reporter telephoned urgently for help last week. "Aggie," he pleaded with City Editor Agness Underwood, "we're in a fix. Judge Nourse has announced that there'll be no pictures taken in court . . . What are our orders: to shoot or not to shoot?" Snapped Aggie: "My instinct is to shoot." Managing Editor Jack Campbell agreed, so long as the pictures were taken when court was not in session. So Aggie rushed down to the courtroom a rugged reinforcement: veteran Hearstling Photographer Perry Fowler, 41, who parachuted into Yugoslavia for the OSS and was captured by the Germans (TIME, June 26, 1944).

A short time later, City Editor Underwood was called to the phone again. This time it was Photographer Fowler calling from Nourse's chambers. Said he: "All right, Aggie. I took the picture. Now I'm under arrest. I've already been convicted, fined $100 and sentenced to five days in jail." That was just what Campbell and Underwood had been hoping for. The case before Judge Nourse, involving a petition to recall Mayor Fletcher Bowron, was hardly sensational news. But the Her-Ex thought that there was an important principle at stake. Almost all Los Angeles courts permit photographs when the court is in recess. If Judge Nourse could jail Photographer Fowler for taking a picture, other judges, in really important cases, might follow suit. To keep the Her-Ex picture franchise, Aggie hustled five more reporters and photographers down to court while Campbell summoned the other Los Angeles papers to battle.

At 2 p.m., when the court convened after the noon recess, lawyers from the Her-Ex and the four other newspapers were arrayed alongside Prisoner Fowler. Judge Nourse, having stuck his chin way out, pulled it back fast before the Her-Ex haymaker landed. Said he solemnly to Fowler: "The record shows I adjourned the court until 2 p.m. tomorrow. The court therefore was not in session at the time you took your photograph. I feel therefore that the order I made sentencing you and finding you in contempt of court was not properly made . . . You are released from custody and purged of contempt."

On Page One, the Her-Ex gleefully ran the story under an eight-column banner, captioned Nourse's picture "Recent Appointee to Superior Court Feels His Oats," and scornfully described him as "the new king of Los Angeles." To drive the point home, Managing Editor Campbell himself wrote a blistering editorial, "Black Robes Should Not Cover Proceedings in Los Angeles Courts." Next day, for good measure, Aggie Underwood and all the other city editors sent swarms of photographers to Judge Nourse's courtroom to snap more pictures--any pictures at all.

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