Associated Press v. United States District Court for Central District of California

INTRODUCTION

In October 1982, Stephen Arrington, John DeLorean, and William Hetrick were indicted in Los Angeles on charges of violating federal narcotics statutes. The legal proceedings surrounding DeLorean’s indictment have created much public interest and received extensive coverage in the press. From the beginning of these proceedings until December 22, 1982, the district court records and files in the case were open to inspection by the press and public. On December 22, however, the district judge responded to the wide press coverage by ordering that

This order was issued sua sponte, without any notice to, or opportunity to be heard by, the parties, the press, or the public. The order was not accompanied by any findings.

*1145 Various members of the press soon asked the district court to reconsider or stay the December 22 order. The district judge held a hearing on January 25, 1983 at which the views of the press, the defendants, and the prosecution were heard. Two months later, on March 22, 1983, the district judge denied the press’s request to stay the December 22 order. He did so after writing a thorough opinion carefully analyzing the various issues. The court left in…

specially concurring:

I agree that the district court should not have imposed an across-the-board sealing of all documents filed and to be filed, and that such an order cannot stand in the light of United States v. Brooklier, 685 F.2d 1162 (9th Cir.1982). It is the law of this court, “until the Supreme Court [otherwise] resolves these issues,” Brooklier at 1167 , that the procedural prerequisites and substantive findings set forth in Brooklier must be *1148 observed before closure of proceedings is ordered. To that rule we today have added that those procedures also apply to pretrial documents which otherwise would constitute public records.

I do not concur in the implication in the majority opinion that adverse pre-trial publicity really is not of much consequence and therefore, presumably, hardly any sealing order could be proper. Neither do I concur in the pure dictum, distilled from a selective quotation from Nebraska Press Ass’n v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 565 , 96 S.Ct. 2791, 2805 , 49 L.Ed.2d 683 (1967), to the effect that “in a large metropolitan area such as Los Angeles, with its millions of potential jurors, it is unlikely that ‘searching questioning of prospective jurors…