With jurors resuming deliberations today in the murder trial of ex-Harvard graduate student Alexander Pring-Wilson, the national media spotlight shines on the Cambridge courtroom where the three-week trial came to a close Thursday.

Pring-Wilson has admitted to fatally stabbing local teen Michael D. Colono in a fight outside a Western Avenue pizzeria last year—although defense lawyers say that Pring-Wilson acted to save his own life.

Pring-Wilson’s background—he is the son of prominent attorneys and spoke five languages—makes him “an atypical criminal defendant,” says Savannah Guthrie, the CourtTV correspondent who has covered the trial for the cable network.

But CourtTV, which has broadcast the Pring-Wilson proceedings to viewers nationwide, initially didn’t plan to cover the trial live.

At summer’s end, Guthrie was returning from a Cape Cod vacation and gearing up to report on the sexual assault trial of basketball superstar Kobe Bryant.

“We can usually only cover one live trial at a time,” Guthrie says. And as dramatic as the Pring-Wilson trial has proved to be, it wouldn’t have garnered the same sort of obsessive national interest that the Bryant case sparked.

But on Sept. 1, a judge in Eagle, Colo., dismissed the case against Bryant after the 19-year-old woman who had levelled the allegations refused to testify in the trial.

Suddenly the Pring-Wilson case leap-frogged to the front of CourtTV’s live trial docket.

Major networks followed CourtTV’s lead in covering the Pring-Wilson trial. CBS’ “The Early Show,” ABC’s “Good Morning America” and the syndicated investigative show “Inside Edition” all ran spots about the case.

“The national media swooped down as if this were a great town-gown cause celèbre,” says Brandeis University political scientist Jeffrey B. Abramson, a visiting professor in Harvard’s government department this year.

“But it was little attended to in the local media,” Abramson says. “The Boston Globe didn’t cover this on a daily basis.”

CourtTV’s decision to broadcast the trial live was—to some extent—a coincidence borne out of the Bryant case’s dismissal. But some legal experts say that the presence of cameras in the courtroom can have far-reaching effects on the conduct of high-profile cases.

The O.J. Simpson trial sparked widespread concerns that television cameras had wielded an undue influence on the Judge Lance Ito, who presided over the case, says Amherst College political scientist Austin D. Sarat, who is a visiting professor in Harvard’s Social Studies program this semester.

“Judges, with this awareness that there’s a public audience looking at them, may develop this sense of what dramatic performance requires,” says Sarat. “Will they look better if they keep a tight rein on lawyers? Will they look better if they give lawyers more latitude?”

The Simpson case “has very much colored people’s perceptions of cameras in the courtroom,” says CNN legal analyst Jeffrey R. Toobin ’82. But Toobin, a former Crimson editorial board chair, says that in general courtroom cameras do not alter the proceedings. “People tend to forget that they’re there and tend to conduct themselves normally,” he says.