A Butler County judge yesterday agreed to hear arguments to overturn a gag order he placed on all participants in the pending homicide trial of a woman charged with stabbing to death her newborn child.

Attorneys for the Post-Gazette and WPXI-TV yesterday filed petitions to join in a complaint by the Tribune-Review and Butler Eagle newspapers.

The four media outlets want Common Pleas Judge Timothy F. McCune to take the muzzle off in the case against Lauren Elizabeth Jones, 25.

The death was discovered in early March after Ms. Jones' mother, Debra Troutman, asked a friend to check out the cause of an odor in her daughter's bedroom.

Ms. Jones lived with her mother on Monroe Street in Buffalo Township.

The infant had been stabbed three times. The body, wrapped in a garbage bag and stuffed inside a backpack, had been placed under a bed.

Ms. Jones told police she went into labor Feb. 28, not knowing that she was pregnant. She killed the child, she said, because she didn't want it to suffer.

Because the baby was younger than 12 years old, Butler County District Attorney Randa Clark has cited age as an aggravating circumstance, making it a capital case.

"We have a policy in this office that if we have one aggravating factor, we seek the death penalty and we leave it up to the jury to see if it will be imposed," Ms. Clark said in May.

A month later, Judge McCune issued the gag order "... prohibiting various persons from speaking with members of the media about any aspect ..." of the case.

The order prohibits anyone remotely involved with the case from saying "anything at all" about it with any media organization.

The media lawyers all yesterday presented petitions opposing the order, calling it too far reaching.

A point in the order, for example, calls for the attorneys' extra-judicial statements to be in accordance with the court's Rule of Professional Conduct. This rule, the plaintiffs argue in their briefs, actually requires that prosecuting and defense attorneys be permitted to speak on some matters to prevent unfairness in the trial and its coverage by the media.

"The gag order is a classic prior restraint on speech by litigants, attorneys and others concerning a pending judicial proceeding," Post-Gazette attorney David J. Bird, from the Reed Smith law firm, wrote in the newspaper's petition.

"Further," Mr. Bird wrote, "the controlling case law makes clear that, if there are any less restrictive means to preserve the integrity of the trial, the court must employ those means before restraining speech."

David A. Strassburger of the firm Strassburger McKenna Gutnick & Potter, which represents the Tribune-Review Publishing Co. and Eagle Printing Co., said in his petition that the gag has put a chilling effect on the press' "instrumentality" in supporting an informed public.

"Prior to the entry of the gag order, several individuals covered by the gag order had spoken with the press, expressed a willingness to speak with the press, and now are prohibited from doing so, thereby chilling speech on important matters of public concern, on the awesome threat of contempt," Mr. Strassburger wrote.

"Although the court may have had laudable intentions, [the prohibition of saying 'anything at all'] goes well beyond anything lawyers are restricted from saying, and well beyond anything necessary to ensure the fairness of these proceedings."

Judge McCune said he will set a hearing date for arguments on the media organizations' petitions.