United States District Court, D. Colorado
ORDER
RAYMOND P. MOORE, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
This
matter is before the Court on Defendants' unopposed
motions to restrict public access to documents upon which
they rely in support of their arguments for summary judgment.
(Restriction Motions, ECF Nos. 191, 194, 196.)[1] In this action,
Plaintiff, a prisoner, brings tort and constitutional claims
alleging that Defendants were indifferent to his serious
medical needs and failed to provide him with adequate medical
care related to a knee injury that occurred during his
incarceration. (5th Am. Compl., ECF No. 136.) The Restriction
Motions all take a similar tack. With little explanation,
they argue that the exhibits to be restricted contain
Plaintiff's confidential medical records and conclude
that the interest in maintaining his privacy outweighs any
public interest served by having unrestricted access to them
on the record. Defendants have filed the materials at issue
under a Level 1 restriction pursuant to D.C.COLO.LCivR
7.2(e).
There
is a common law right of access to judicial records. Mann
v. Boatright, 477 F.3d 1140, 1149 (10th Cir. 2007).
“Nevertheless, the right of access is not
absolute.” United States v. Apperson, 642
Fed.Appx. 892, 899 (10th Cir. 2016) (unpublished). As a
result, a court may exercise its discretion to seal judicial
records. Helm v. Kansas, 656 F.3d 1277, 1292 (10th
Cir. 2011). “In exercising this discretion, [courts]
weigh the interests of the public, which are presumptively
paramount, against those advanced by the parties.”
Id. (quotation omitted). The presumption in favor of
public access is “particularly strong” when, as
here, a district court uses “sealed documents to
determine litigants' substantive legal rights.”
Apperson, 642 Fed.Appx. at 899 (quotation and
internal quotation omitted). By contrast, when documents
“‘play only a negligible role in the performance
of Article III duties, the weight of presumption is low and
amounts to little more than a prediction of public access
absent a countervailing reason.'” Riker v. Fed.
Bureau of Prisons, 315 Fed.Appx. 752, 755 (10th Cir.
2009) (unpublished) (quoting Lugosch v. Pyramid Co. of
Onondaga, 435 F.3d 110, 121 (2d Cir. 2006)). The party
seeking to restrict public access to judicial records has the
burden of showing an interest that outweighs the presumption
in favor of access. Helm, 656 F.3d at 1292.
Under
this legal umbrella, the Local Rules of this District require
a party moving to restrict access to judicial records to (1)
identify the document or the proceeding for which restriction
is sought; (2) address the interest to be protected and why
such interest outweighs the presumption of public access
(stipulations between the parties or stipulated protective
orders with regard to discovery, alone, are insufficient to
justify restriction); (3) identify a clearly defined and
serious injury that would result if access is not restricted;
(4) explain why no alternative to restriction is practicable
or why only restriction will adequately protect the interest
in question (e.g., redaction, summarization,
restricted access to portions of exhibits); and (5) identify
the level of restriction sought. D.C.COLO.LCivR 7.2(c). Here,
Defendants have identified the documents at issue and
specified the restrictions they seek. But while they pay
lip-service to the public interest, they offer no thorough
analysis explaining how this interest outweighs the
public's right to view the material portions of documents
upon which the Court's judgment-if entered-may be based.
Nor do they show why an alternative to restriction, such as
redaction, is impracticable.
The
Court does not defer to Defendants' assumption that the
public's interest in these records would be minimal,
especially considering the use to which these exhibits would
be put. In Riker, the Tenth Circuit cited with
approval the Second Circuit's decision in
Lugosch, in which the Second Circuit addressed the
public's interest in documents attached to a motion for
summary judgment and stated: “As to the weight of the
presumption given to such documents, Joy v. North[,
692 F.2d 880 (2d Cir. 1982), ] has already clarified that the
presumption is of the highest: documents used by parties
moving for, or opposing, summary judgment should not remain
under seal absent the most compelling
reasons.” Lugosch, 435 F.3d at 123
(citations and quotations omitted, emphasis in original).
Contrary to Defendants' statement, and under the law of
this circuit, the public presumably has an interest in access
to documents filed in support of a motion for summary
judgment. See, e.g., Hill v. Corr. Corp. of
Am., No. 14-CV-02960-MSK-MJW, 2016 WL 8925432 (D. Colo.
June 20, 2016), aff'd, 685 Fed.Appx. 665 (10th
Cir. 2017).
The
Court's review of the documents at issue here reveals
that they contain little-to-no sensitive information,
especially given that Plaintiff made the content contained
therein exceedingly public through this action. The documents
generally are (1) doctors' notes, opinions, evaluations,
and other medical materials related to Plaintiff's knee
injury and (2) communications and appeal papers related to
Plaintiff's requests for treatment of the same. (ECF Nos.
192-1, 192-2, 194-1, 194-2, 194-3, 194-4, 194-5, 194-6.) The
Court notes that Plaintiffs social security number appears in
several places. (See, e.g., ECF No. 194-1, at 10,
60.) But the Court does not agree that the vast majority of
the remaining content is sensitive when his knee
injury-together with Plaintiffs attempts to get medical
attention-is the centerpiece of this action. As this Court
has previously stated, “[a]lthough the Court concedes
that [Plaintiff] has some privacy interest in his medical
records, that privacy interest is voluntarily compromised
when he brings a lawsuit that necessarily concerns his
medical condition and the treatment he received.”
Hill, 2016 WL 8925432, at *8 (prisoner case against
same entity that defends here).
Given
the public's strong interest in having access to the
exhibits upon which the Court will evaluate summary judgment
motions and Plaintiffs diminished interest in protecting
information that forms the core of his claims, a restriction
on public access is not warranted, and the Restriction
Motions (ECF Nos. 191, 194, 196) are DENIED.
Defendants may file appropriately redacted exhibits on or
before the date their replies to their motions for summary
judgment are due (April 4, 2019). Should Defendants fail to
file such redacted documents on or before that date, the
documents will become unrestricted-and thus open to public
inspection-the following day. The Clerk shall maintain
restriction of ECF Nos. 191, 194, and 196 until further order
from the Court.
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Notes:
[1] ECF Nos. 194 and 196, together with
the attachments thereto, are identical. Defendant CoreCivic,
Inc. filed its restriction ...