Opinion ID: 4514225
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Redaction of Plea Hearing Transcript

Text: The district court principally acted within its discretion in sealing approximately six pages of the forty‐seven‐page plea transcript on November 8, 2018, and declining to unseal the transcript six months later, on April 4, 2019. In 6 its November 8, 2018 order, the district court made specific and detailed factual findings in support of its sealing decision. We discern no clear error in the court’s findings, and we agree that the presumption in favor of public access to the relatively small sealed portion of the plea transcript was overcome by higher values recognized under our decisions in Brown, Lugosch, and related cases. Although the district court did not repeat its specific findings when, on April 4, 2019, it declined to unseal the unredacted plea transcript or the November 8, 2018 sealing order, the court expressly “considered the [Times’s] application and the government’s [sealed] response.” App’x 4, 70. We note that, with the passage of six months, the district court could have been more explicit by stating that the circumstances at the time of its November 8, 2018 order had not materially changed so as to warrant unsealing. See Brown, 929 F.3d at 47 (specific findings are necessary to justify “continued sealing” (emphasis added) (quoting Lugosch, 435 F.3d at 121)); see also, e.g., United States v. Wolfson, 55 F.3d 58, 60 (2d Cir. 1995). Nevertheless, like the district court, we have reviewed the government’s sealed letter responding to the Times’s unsealing request and conclude that it provides specific and detailed factual information that mainly supports the district court’s decision to keep the unredacted plea transcript under seal. In these 7 circumstances, we see no need to remand for the district court to further explain its April 4, 2019 sealing decision; rather, we believe that the district court’s express reliance on the government’s sealed letter, combined with its specific findings in its prior sealing order, is sufficiently clear to satisfy our precedents. Although we therefore largely affirm the district court’s sealing orders as being within the court’s discretion, we conclude that the district court abused its discretion to the limited extent that it sealed certain matters that were publicly disclosed at the time that the district court issued its sealing orders. Accordingly, we vacate the district court’s sealing orders in part and remand with instructions to unredact, at a minimum, page 44, lines 23–25 and page 46, lines 4–7 of the plea transcript. In so doing, however, we acknowledge that an evolving factual situation can make the decision about whether to seal information challenging, even where, as here, the district court acts diligently. In addition, we note that, while this appeal was pending, the district court unsealed certain docket entries and documents that may reveal information contained in the redacted portions of the plea transcript. Accordingly, on remand the district should consider whether, and to what extent, other redacted portions of the plea transcript may now be unsealed in light of the court’s intervening unsealing order or other changed 8 circumstances.