Bill Farr's 46 days

The late Bill Farr was an L.A. Times reporter who became nationally known -- and an entry in First Amendment and journalism textbooks -- when he sat for 46 days in county jail in 1972-73 rather than tell a judge which lawyers had violated a gag order during the notorious Charles Manson murder trial.

It got more complicated than that, the Downtown News recalls today in a piece by Jay Berman. Farr originally wrote his story -- that Manson and his followers planned to murder Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, among others -- for the Herald Examiner. He cited the California journalists' shield law in refusing to divulge his sources, but he soon left the paper to work for the DA. At that point, well after the Mansons were convicted of killing actress Sharon Tate and six others, Judge Charles Older ruled that since Farr was no longer a reporter, he had to give up the sources.

In 1971 Farr took a job at the Times, but a year later a stubborn Older had Farr jailed for contempt of court. The incarceration was indefinite. Recalls Berman:

Since I had replaced him as Busch's press secretary, I had a badge that identified me as a member of the executive staff. It allowed me access to the attorneys' room at the jail and gave me the opportunity to serve easily as Farr's conduit to the outside.

I visited him each of the 46 days he was there - Christmas, New Year's Day - trying to keep his spirits up and bringing him messages from other friends. Farr was an upbeat person by nature. He didn't even speak ill of Older, saying he understood that the judge believed he was doing the right thing.

After his release, he pointed out that, had he known he was going to jail for 46 days for protecting a source, he would have had no problems with quietly serving the sentence. But, until the day before his release, when news of Justice Douglas' intervention started to spread, Farr still feared that he might have been serving the start of a life sentence.

Farr was sprung through the personal intervention of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. He died in 1987 at age 52 without revealing the attorneys' names -- and remained known for having good sources.