In summing up, the judge Tweeted….

OK, maybe that’s a bit far off, but it seems the Twitter phenomenon has already spread to the court room. The Lord Chief Justice for England and Wales has ruled that Tweeting from court is to be made legal for the first time. ‘Live text-based communication’, he said, would be allowed as long as the judge believed it would not interfere with the administration of justice. Lord Judge’s ruling came after journalists used Twitter at the bail hearing of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to give live updates, with the judges blessing.

The interim guidance  takes immediate effect and covers ‘the use of mobile, e-mail and social media such as Twitter, and Internet-enabled laptops’, with a review to follow. Lord Justice Judge’s ruling said: “The use of an unobtrusive, hand-held, virtually silent piece of modern equipment for the purposes of simultaneous reporting of proceedings to the outside world as they unfold in court is unlikely to interfere with the proper administration of justice.”

It’s hard to argue that a quick Tweet to update the public will interfere with justice, especially as the public are welcome to attend the courts anyway. However, the use of Twitter in court as a whole remains a contentious issue.

Last year in the U.S, the verdicts of two US trials were appealed against because jurors in the two cases made postings on Twitter and Facebook, jurors being forbidden to discuss anything relating to a case outside the deliberation room. Even a message as vague as “a big announcement on Monday” was enough for defence lawyers to call for the jurors removal from court, the Judge eventually allowing him to stay. In a separate case, a building materials company ordered by a judge to pay $12.6m to its investors, appealed the decision, claiming that a juror was posting messages relating to the trial on Twitter. The juror Tweeted: ”Nobody buy Stoam. It’s bad mojo and they’ll probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter.” The defendants’ lawyers argued that the Tweet showed that juror Jonathan Powell “was predisposed toward giving a verdict that would impress his audience”.

With this in mind, would it not be better to ban all forms of technology like Twitter from the courts, keeping to the traditional methods of reporting a case? Or is it the right time for the courts to embrace emerging technology?

Only time will tell, but I think we can expect Twitter to court more controversy in the coming months…