Shoofly Pye

THE BENCH

Prathia Laura Ann Hall was in bad trouble. It was not just her modest misdemeanor -- violating Georgia's antitrespass law during a motel sit-in. The 23-year-old Negro girl faced a far more formidable fate in the person of Judge Durwood T. Pye of Fulton County (Atlanta) Superior Court. Pye, the South's toughest judge in civil rights cases, set bail at a fantastic $4,500.

Unable to raise it, Prathia Hall spent two weeks in jail awaiting a trial in which she could expect the absolute maximum: six months in jail, twelve months in the county work camp, and a $1,000 fine. Hipped on Race. To her amazement, and Pye's ire, Defendant Hall escaped. Armed with a writ of habeas corpus, U.S. marshals whisked her out of her cell and freed her on $1,000 bond. "The United States Government has taken said defendant away," roared Judge Pye. "The court is physically unable to proceed with the trial." The court also was unable to try 58 other civil rights defendants who flew the coop by federal court orders. Last week, Pye scheduled trials for 42 more trespass defendants, but with little expectation that they would remain in his jurisdiction.

This remarkable struggle has few precedents in U.S. legal history. And it stems largely from the character of Judge Durwood Pye, a scholarly white-supremacist. Graduating at the top of his class at Atlanta Law School, he became a formidable lawyer before becoming a judge in 1956. A stickler for detail, he has ground out opinions of more than 600 pages, once fined Atlanta newspapers $20,000 for contempt for describing a defendant's past, banned news cameras and tape recorders not only in his courtroom, but also on "adjacent sidewalks and public streets." At 54, Pye is tetchy as a loaded derringer; he is wont to hector witnesses and explode at any moment over what he calls "mongrelization of the races." Trying to be fair to Pye, another Atlanta judge sums up: "He's a fine, decent, honest, hard-working man, except that he happens to be hipped on the subject of race."

Last summer Pye launched a one-man crusade against sit-ins. Thundering that Georgia's antitrespass law had been "flouted, defied and violated," he ordered indictments prepared in 101 civil rights trespass cases, some dating back to 1961. Pye set bail as high as $20,000; where defendants had already been released on bonds of $300 or $500, he upped the ante to $3,000 or more, explaining that he "acted on my own motion." Then he began meting out ferocious sentences. His most famed was six months in jail and a year at hard labor for Connecticut College Student Mardon Walker, an 18-year-old white girl who had taken part last winter in a nonviolent sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant. Even the Atlanta Constitution, which opposed the demonstrations, snapped that the punishment was "disturbingly disproportionate."

Court v. Court. All this plunged Pye into an extraordinary hassle with the federal courts that hinges on a rarely used relic of Reconstruction days: Section 1443, Title 28, U.S. Code. Designed as an escape hatch from lower courts, it allows a defendant to petition for removal of his case from a state to a federal court if his civil rights are nullified by the state's legal apparatus. But unfairness is hard to prove, and federal judges are notably loath to affront state courts by accepting such cases. Lately, however, defendants all over the South have sought to escape state courts through Section 1443. And nowhere have they been more successful than in Judge Pye's court.

Pye has hardly taken it lying down. In a single week last month, he twice defied the Federal Government. When the U.S. Court of Appeals took over 20 of his trespass cases, Pye protested that they were still his, "hide, hair and talon," kept them on his calendar for trial. He reacted similarly when U.S. District Judge Boyd Sloan removed another 38 trespass cases. It was to no avail. Sloan enjoined the county sheriff from touching any of the total 58 ex-Pye defendants, then sent his marshals to free the jailed Prathia Hall.

His bench stacked with 46 law books, Judge Pye is now angrily pressing for an appeal to the Supreme Court. The odds against him seem high. Last week his 42 current trespass defendants requested trial in federal court. As for Pye, his days as a Superior Court judge may be numbered. His eight-year term runs out early next year: if he aims to stay on the bench, he must run for reelection in November. Atlanta newspapers are generally against him. And Negroes, who comprise about 35% of Fulton County's population, can hardly wait for election day.

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