Opinion ID: 182596
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Redacted Audio

Text: EOUSA also withheld from PLN certain segments of the audio track accompanying the first portion of the video. Those segments amount to four statements made by the Sablans. PLN argues no portion of the audio track is exempt and the district court erred in ordering EOUSA to release only the portions of the audio containing statements made by BOP officials. The district court, stating that access to records under FOIA was limited to records that shed light on governmental activity, concluded that only the statements of government officials fell within the ambit of FOIA's disclosure requirement. FOIA's disclosure requirement, however, has no such limitation. Rather, under FOIA, agencies are required to release any requested agency records unless they fall within one of the exemptions. U.S. Dep't of Justice v. Tax Analysts, 492 U.S. 136, 150-51, 109 S.Ct. 2841, 106 L.Ed.2d 112 (1989). The district court thus incorrectly permitted EOUSA to withhold portions of the audio without deciding whether those portions were exempt from disclosure. This court may nonetheless affirm on any ground that is supported in the record and raised on appeal. Pullman v. Chorney, 712 F.2d 447, 449 (10th Cir.1983). As the government represented at oral argument and verified by in camera examination, the redacted statements of the Sablans pertain to what they were doing to Estrella's body. The government made clear at oral argument that these statements were also withheld under Exemption 7(C) on the same grounds as the images discussed above. For the same reasons that Estrella's family has an interest in not being subjected to the public display of gruesome images of their deceased relative, they also have a privacy interest in the voices of the perpetrators themselves describing the heinous acts in progress. Like the images, these audio recordings add little or nothing to the large amount of public knowledge about the crimes and the government's response to them. The Sablans' voices describing their actions are part and parcel of the images of corpse mutilation. Because the same considerations apply to these audio records as to the images, the statements were properly withheld under Exemption 7(C).