Twitter Coup: Tweeting Journalist Has Right to Report from Court

by Tina Kells | March 10, 2009 at 09:50 am

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Twitter continues to change the world one tweet at a time. This time the microblogging service was at the center of a court challenge by defense attorneys that a journalist using Twitter to tweet live time updates of an ongoing court case was a violation of their client's right to a fair trial.

The judge hearing the case disagreed with defense counsel and granted the journalist the right to continue to tweet updates of the trial to the Twitter community.

In a victory for news technology in federal courts, a judge is allowing a reporter to use the microblogging service Twitter to provide constant updates from a racketeering gang trial this week.

It's not the first time online streaming has been allowed in courtrooms, but the practice is still rare in the federal system, especially in criminal cases.

A couple of lawyers voiced concern about the possibility that a juror might visit the online site to read the posts from Ron Sylvester, a reporter for the Wichita Eagle, but U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten said jurors are always told to avoid newspaper, broadcast and online reports.

"You either trust your jurors to live with the admonishment, or you don't," he said.