Opinion ID: 391003
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Need for Public Access to the Documents at Issue

Text: 47 Under this heading we bring together several considerations which in our judgment bear upon the precise weight to be assigned in this case to the always strong presumption in favor of public access to judicial proceedings. Some of these considerations have already been mentioned and others, because they also bear on the reasons why public access might be denied, will be emphasized again later. 48 We first note that this case does not involve access to the courtroom conduct of a criminal trial, recently found by the Supreme Court to be constitutionally protected. 90 Nor does it involve access to the courtroom conduct of a pre-trial suppression motion, access the Court a year earlier ruled the sixth amendment alone did not protect. 91 It does not involve access to documents which have been introduced as evidence of guilt or innocence in a trial, 92 nor even documents whose contents have been discussed or insofar as we can determine relied upon by the trial judge in his decision on the defendants' motion to suppress. As we emphasize below, 93 it concerns only access to documents introduced by the defendants solely to show the overbreadth of a search whose lawfulness, although decided by the trial judge in the government's favor, was certain to be appealed at the time the unsealing order was entered. 94 49 The public in this case had access, inter alia, to the courtroom proceedings on the motion to suppress, to the memoranda filed by the parties in connection with that motion, to the trial judge's memorandum decision on the suppression motion, to the trial judge's memorandum decision on the negotiated disposition, to the stipulated record which was the basis for the defendants' convictions and to the actual trial of the criminal charges of which the defendants were convicted. None of the documents at issue here was either used in the examination of witnesses during the protracted public hearing on the suppression motion or specifically referred to in the trial judge's public decision on the motion to suppress or included as part of the publicly available stipulated record on which the defendants' criminal convictions were had. 95 50 Under all these circumstances we conclude that the purposes of public access are only modestly served by the trial judge's unsealing decision.