Long Reach of the Law

Georgia's lawyers and reporters alike walk on tiptoe in the presence of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Durwood T. Pye, a terrible-tempered, robe-twitching jurist whose boiling point is the lowest on the Atlanta bench. Pye once ordered the wholesale arrest of noisy loungers in a corridor outside his courtroom, had to reverse himself when it developed that the loudest noisemaker was a fellow judge, telling jokes at the Coke machine. Last week, mustering a group courage, the Georgia press loudly complained that the autocratic judge had gone too far.

The case in point was a crusty Pye ruling that prohibited news photographs and sound recordings not only in his courtroom and courthouse but on "adjacent sidewalks and public streets." Pye issued the order the day that State Revenue Commissioner T. V. Williams, charged with larceny after trust, came up for trial. Atlanta papers carefully obeyed the Pye mandate, snapped no new pictures of Defendant Williams, although the Constitution got a picture of him out of its files and ran it on Page One for four days in a row while the hearing was in progress.

When the trial was over (Williams was acquitted), the Georgia Press Association and Atlanta Newspapers. Inc. brought suit challenging the constitutionality of Judge Pye's long reach. Said the Georgia Press Association, amid a statewide chorus of editorial indignation: "A usurpation of greater authority than was granted him by the public which placed him in office . . . Judge Pye's ruling, if literally interpreted. could apply to any home, street or sidewalk in the state of Georgia."

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