No tweeting in the court?

Moments before a trial in a notorious Montgomery County home-invasion slaying started June 8, a deputy sheriff made a rare announcement: Everyone carrying a cell phone had to step outside the packed courtroom and put it in a cardboard box in the hallway.

In an era of instant communication - when high-profile proceedings such as those in Pennsylvania involving former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo and the Bonusgate defendants are live-blogged and posted to Twitter as they unfold - the move struck a blow to reporters' ability to deliver news as they watched it happen.

But a Pennsylvania court rule bars "the transmission of communications by telephone, radio, television, or advanced communications technology from the hearing room or the courtroom," placing the state's courts at loggerheads with the explosion of online-everywhere technology.

That prohibition is now being reexamined by a state Supreme Court committee charged with sorting out how First Amendment freedoms may conflict with the potential for sabotaging trials.

"It's a new world," Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille said in an interview Thursday. "We want to address it rationally."

A national debate is rapidly emerging over the subject. Castille, who said he had never logged on to Twitter or Facebook, has found himself discussing social networking with other members of the Conference of Chief Justices. In November, a federal judge in Georgia ruled that going online from a courtroom violates the federal justice system's prohibition on "broadcasting of judicial proceedings," though the ruling does not set precedent for other courts.

"This is a fluid issue," said Sam Bayard, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and assistant director of the Harvard-affiliated Citizen Media Law Project. "I think it's a very important one because simultaneous reporting is becoming more and more vital to what journalists are doing, and it offers the public a fascinating look at trials as they are going on.

"It's a little bit in tension," Bayard continued, "with ideas about proper administration of justice and fairness to the parties in the cases."

Castille said the danger was that jurors and witnesses might, via Twitter or text message, receive information from which they are supposed to be shielded. He noted the considerable potential for witness intimidation when nearly anyone can post who-said-what, with a snapshot from a courthouse hallway, to the bevy of social-media networks.

"It doesn't bother me with the reporters," said Castille, who was Philadelphia's district attorney before he won a seat on the state's highest court. "That's their job. . . . I guess the quicker [a reporter] can get the information out, the better. I don't have any problems with that. It's some of the other situations we've discussed which might give us pause."

The state court system's ban is frequently disregarded, which leads to court-to-court variations.

"These judges do run their own courtrooms," Castille said, chuckling lightly.

In January, during former State Rep. Mike Veon's Bonusgate criminal trial, Dauphin County Judge Richard A. Lewis declined a defense request to ban Twitter - thus allowing thousands of words to fly into cyberspace about testimony, jurors' demeanor, and judicial rulings as they happened.

The state rule bars only communication, not computers - which Twitter-using reporters have noted creates the potential for another problem.

"What's to stop me from writing a tweet on my laptop, then going out of the courtroom to send it, which would be more disruptive?" asked Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Tracie Mauriello, whose frequent Twitter postings were cited in the defendant's brief.

Use of a laptop during a trial can create its own distractions. Complaints from another reporter and jurors sent Mauriello to the back of the courtroom more than once when the loudness of her keystrokes drowned out witnesses' soft-spoken testimony.

In Montgomery County, Judge Thomas P. Rogers said he was not so worried about in-court distractions from the gallery, mostly filled with reporters and law interns there to observe proceedings.

But Rogers is a member of the state Supreme Court committee examining the prohibition, and the rule was on his mind, he said, as the highly publicized home-invasion trial began. So Rogers, a former Lower Providence police chief, hewed to the letter of the law.

"Not that my personal opinion matters, but I and a lot of the judges feel that what's [banned] under that section includes twittering," Rogers said.

Castille drew the same conclusion after a reporter read the rule to him. "That's why we want to take a look at it," he said Thursday.

The rule was adopted in 2002, long before Facebook and Twitter sprang up as the wildly popular Internet sites inviting contributions from anyone inclined to share their observations.

Since then, both have become important news-spreading mechanisms. Via Twitter, reports and pictures of the airliner that landed in the Hudson in 2009 spread faster than traditional news organizations could post full stories, and dissidents in Iran used Twitter to organize rallies.

A Pennsylvania Newspaper Association lawyer said the group would back any effort to change the rule and permit unobtrusive Internet posting from courtrooms.

"We have to comply with the court's rules, and I don't think the court's rules have kept up with technology," said Melissa Melewsky, the newspaper group's media law attorney. "And I think that's typical."

There is no timeline for when a rules change might be discussed. The committee met Friday, but Rogers said by phone during a break that the technology rule was likely a few months away from the formal agenda.