Court Opinion

ID: 9431295
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:31:54.107789+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:27.844026
License: Public Domain

*15Justice Scalia,
with whom Justice White and Justice O’Connor join, dissenting.
I dissent from today’s decision because in my view it fails to perform the fundamental judicial function of reading the body of enacted laws in such fashion as to cause none of them to be pointless; and because in order to achieve that failure it makes a departure, sure to engender confusion and litigation, from the general principle of the Freedom of Information Act that individuating characteristics of requesters are not to be considered. I address each of these points in turn.
In 1975, Congress approved Rule 32(c)(3)(E) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, providing that a defendant cannot retain copies of the presentence report unless the sentencing judge (presumably familiar with the dangerousness of the defendant and his associates) specifically directs. Act of July 31, 1975, Pub. L. 94-64, § 2, 89 Stat. 370. In the 1976 Parole Act, Congress adopted a clause completely consistent with this provision, requiring the Parole Commission, at least 30 days before a scheduled parole hearing, to provide the inmate only “reasonable access” to the report — a term that assuredly does not require, and indeed is ordinarily used specifically to make clear that there is not required, retention of the document. Today the Court holds that all this really does not matter, because the defendant can obtain a copy of the report under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U. S. C. § 552, as soon as it is transferred to the Bureau of Prisons and the Parole Commission after his sentencing.
If the FOIA had been adopted after the protective provisions in question, one could at least argue that there had been a change of heart by Congress, and if not repeal by implication at least frustration by implication. But the fact is that the relevant provision of the FOIA was enacted in its current form in 1967, before the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure and Parole Act provisions at issue here, Pub. L. 90-23, 81 *16Stat. 54. Nonetheless, today’s decision converts the Rule 32 requirement that retention be explicitly approved by the sentencing judge into no more than a temporary inconvenience, since the defendant can obtain the document without such approval shortly after his sentencing; and it reduces the Parole Act time and manner limitations (which provide that the duty arises only when a parole hearing has been scheduled, and that the content of the duty is to provide only “reasonable access”) to utter meaninglessness.
I am frank to admit that I cannot readily conceive why allowing a defendant or an inmate to keep a copy of the report is significantly more threatening than allowing him to read and make notes about it. Penal and probationary authorities believed otherwise, however — and apparently continue to believe so, as is evident from the 1985 statement of the Chief of the Division of Probation of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, opposing a proposal that the Parole Commission provide by rule for routine release of copies of presentence reports:
“[I]t is the position of the Probation Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, as well as the Probation Division of the Administrative Office of the U. S. Courts, that permitting a defendant to keep a copy of his presentence report could likely impede the ability of U. S. probation officers to gather information and protect their sources.
“Were a defendant permitted to retain a copy of his report . . . there would be no way to effectively prohibit further disclosure of the information to third parties. This possibility is far more dangerous to a source of information than is the possibility of the defendant revealing his recollection of what he read in the report prior to sentencing.
*17“[Rule 32(c)(3)(E)] embodies the concern of the courts that the defendant’s retention of the presentence report is normally inimical to the interests of obtaining full and accurate information prior to sentencing.” Letter from Probation Chief Chamlee to Chairman of Parole Comm’n Baer, June 17, 1985, App. to Pet. for Cert. 25a-26a.
I have no idea whether this is sound, and neither does the Court. But the issue was obviously addressed by Congress, and resolved in favor of restricted access. We should not frustrate that disposition unless the FOIA unavoidably so requires. As I now proceed to discuss, just the opposite is true: A genuine revolution in accepted FOIA principles is required to produce today’s peculiar result.
H»I b-i
It is too well established to warrant extensive discussion— or at least until today has been — that the FOIA is not meant to provide documents to particular individuals who have special entitlement to them, but rather “to inform the public about agency action.” NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 421 U. S. 132, 143, n. 10 (1975) (emphasis added). In his foreword to an official Justice Department Memorandum for agency guidance describing the then newly enacted FOIA, Attorney General Clark correctly identified as one of the five key concerns of the Act the goal “that all individuals have equal rights of access.” Attorney General’s Memorandum on Public Information Section of Administrative Procedure Act, United States Department of Justice iv (June 1967) (emphasis added) (hereinafter AG Memorandum). The scholarly commentators agreed:
“The Act’s sole concern is with what must be made public or not made public. The Act never provides for disclosure to some private parties and withholding from others. The main provision of section 3 says that information is to be made available ‘to the public’ and the central provision of subsection (c) requires availability of *18records to ‘any person.’” Davis, The Information Act: A Preliminary Analysis, 34 U. Chi. L. Rev. 761, 765 (1967).
What has been true of the FOIA in general has also been true of Exemption 5 in particular, which exempts from mandatory production “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.” 5 U. S. C. § 552(b)(5).1 As Attorney General Clark’s Memo*19randum went on to explain, “[t]he effect of exemption (5) is to make available to the general public those internal documents from agency files which are routinely available to litigants, unless some other document bars disclosure.” AG Memorandum 38 (emphasis added). It has long been established that in applying Exemption 5 the individuating characteristics of the particular requester are not to be considered. As the District of Columbia Circuit put it in the leading case, which we have cited with approval, see NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., supra, at 149, n. 16: “The question for decision is . . . whether ‘“a private party” — not necessarily the applicant — would routinely be entitled to [the agency record] through discovery.’” Sterling Drug Inc. v. FTC, 146 U. S. App. D. C. 237, 244, 450 F. 2d 698, 705 (1971), quoting from Davis, supra, at 796.
We approved this principle in EPA v. Mink, 410 U. S. 73 (1973), a FOIA suit brought by 33 Members of the House of Representatives, saying in regard to Exemption 5 that “the Act [does not], by its terms, permit inquiry into particularized needs of the individual seeking the information, although such an inquiry would ordinarily be made of a private litigant.” Id., at 86. It is significant that although one of the most controversial features of the 1974 amendments to the FOIA was the revision of § 552(b)(1) to overturn the holding of Mink regarding Exemption 1, see President’s Message to the House of Representatives Returning H. R. 12471 Without His Approval, 10 Weekly Comp. of Pres. Doc. 1318 (1974), Exemption 5 was left unchanged. We strongly reaffirmed our Mink approach in NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co.:
“Sears’ rights under the Act are neither increased nor decreased by reason of the fact that it claims an interest *20in the Advice and Appeals Memoranda greater than that shared'by the average member of the public. The Act is fundamentally designed to inform the public about agency action and not to benefit private litigants.” 421 U. S., at 143, n. 10.
“[I]t is not sensible to construe the Act to require disclosure of any document which would be disclosed in the hypothetical litigation in which the private party’s claim is the most compelling. Indeed, the House Report says that Exemption 5 was intended to permit disclosure of those intra-agency memoranda which would ‘routinely be disclosed’ in private litigation, H. R. Rep. No. 1497, p. 10, and we accept this as the law. [Citing Sterling Drug, supra.]” Id., at 149, n. 16.
Again in 1983, we confirmed the basic principle underlying all this, that if an Exemption 5 privilege cannot be asserted against one particular requester, it cannot be asserted against the world:
“The logical result of respondent’s position is that whenever work-product documents would be discoverable in any particular litigation, they must be disclosed to anyone under the FOIA. We have previously rejected that line of analysis.” FTC v. Grolier Inc., 462 U. S. 19, 28.
Most recently, in 1984, we again disregarded the identity and circumstances of the FOIA requester for purposes of making the Exemption 5 determination, expressing the basis for our decision quite simply: “[SJince the Machín privilege [protecting confidential statements made to government air crash safety investigators] is well recognized in the case law as precluding routine disclosure of the statements, the statements are covered by Exemption 5.” United States v. Weber Aircraft Corp., 465 U. S. 792, 799.2
*21In sum, the clear state of the law before today’s decision has been that “the scope of Exemption 5 is to be determined without regard to the particular circumstances or needs of any specific actual or hypothetical party.” Brockway v. Department of Air Force, 518 F. 2d 1184, 1192, n. 7 (CA8 1975). Or as one of the current FOIA looseleaf services categorically states: “[N]o requester is entitled to greater rights of access under Exemption 5 by virtue of whatever special interests might influence the outcome of actual civil discovery to which he is a party.” J. Franklin & R. Bouchard, Guidebook to the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, §1.08[2], p. 1-72 (2d ed., 1987). Thus, it is simply inaccurate for the Court to say that “the reasoning of the cases denying disclosure to third-party requesters would have little applicability to a request by a defendant to examine his own report. . . .” Ante, at 13. The reasoning of the cases, like the reasoning of the scholars and the language of the statute, recognizes no such thing as a “third-party requester,” since it affirms that all FOIA requesters have equivalent status, and equivalent right to the public documents that the FOIA identifies. Nor is the Court’s error corrected by the qualifier that it adds, “particularly in light of Rule 32(c)’s specific mandate that the report be disclosed to the defendant during sentencing.” Ibid. That “mandate” (which in any event, as I have discussed, does not require provision of a retention-copy of the document) cannot be applied without impermissibly adverting to the individuating characteristics of the requester.
The Court’s error is further demonstrated by the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974, 5 U. S. C. § 552a — which, unlike the FOIA, is intended to provide to a particular individual documents that would not be available to the public at large, namely, documents containing “information about *22[that] individual.” §552a(a)(4). Why, one might wonder, did not the present respondents seek the requested report under the provisions of that legislation? The answer is § 552a(j)(2)(C), which specifically permits agencies, by regulation, to exclude from available records “reports identifiable to an individual compiled at any stage of the process of enforcement of the criminal laws from arrest or indictment through release from supervision.”3 This provision, when combined with the limitations contained in Rule 32 and the 1976 Parole Act, makes it entirely clear that Congress did not mean the FOIA to give these respondents any greater right than the general public to copies of their presentence investigation reports.
Since, as I have confessed earlier, it is not clear to me why providing a copy of the report is so much worse than providing inspection, it may perhaps be that the dire consequences predicted by those who persuaded Congress to adopt the limitations that we today repeal will not ensue. I have no doubt, however, that today’s decision will be a bombshell in the area of FOIA law. Contrary to settled precedent, the Court has adopted the principle that the individuating characteristics of the requester may be taken into account for purposes of one of the most important and frequently invoked exemptions, Exemption 5. To be sure, only a particular individuating characteristic, which the Court takes pains to narrow, is the subject of the present suit. But once we have adopted the principle, we have condemned the lower courts (and, I suppose, ourselves) to an appreciable increase in the volume of FOIA litigation, as one requester after an*23other tests whether some statute, some principle of law, some court rule, justifies taking Ms particular characteristics into account. I respectfully dissent from this unfortunate holding.

 Respondents contend that presentence reports are not “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums” within the meaning of Exemption 5, since they are prepared by probation officers, who are appointed by and serve under the direction of the courts, see 18 U. S. C. §§ 3602(a) and 3603(8) (1982 ed., Supp. IV), and since courts are not “agencies” for purposes of the FOIA, see 5 U. S. C. §§ 551(1)(B) and 552(f) (1982 ed. and Supp. IV). Although the Court does not reach this issue, see ante, at 11, n. 9,1 must. Apart from its present context, the most natural meaning of the phrase “intra-agency memorandum” is a memorandum that is addressed both to and from employees of a single agency — as opposed to an “inter-agency memorandum,” which would be a memorandum between employees of two different agencies. The problem with this interpretation is that it excludes many situations where Exemption 5’s purpose of protecting the Government’s deliberative process is plainly applicable. Consequently, the Courts of Appeals have uniformly rejected it, holding the “intra-agency memorandum” exemption applicable to such matters as information furnished by Senators to the Attorney General concerning judicial nominations, see Ryan v. Department of Justice, 199 U. S. App. D. C. 199, 207-209, 617 F. 2d 781, 789-791 (1980), and reports prepared by outside consultants, see Government Land Bank v. GSA, 671 F. 2d 663, 665 (CA1 1982). It seems to me that these decisions are supported by a permissible and desirable reading of the statute. It is textually possible and much more in accord with the purpose of the provision, to regard as an intra-agency memorandum one that has been received by an agency, to assist it in the performance of its own functions, from a person acting in a govern-mentally conferred capacity other than on behalf of another agency — e. g., in a capacity as employee or consultant to the agency, or as employee or officer of another governmental unit (not an agency) thát is authorized or required to provide advice to the agency. Here we haye a memorandum that fits readily within this definition. See Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 32(c)(3)(D) (referring to “any copy of the presentence investigation report *19. . . made available to the Bureau of Prisons or the Parole Commission”); 18 U. S. C. § 4205(e) (making it “the duty of the various probation officers” to provide the reports of prisoners eligible for parole to the Parole Commission upon request).

 The privilege protecting presentence reports is unquestionably “well recognized in the case law as precluding routine disclosure.” See, e. g., United States v. Charmer Industries, Inc., 711 F. 2d 1164, 1175-1176 *21(CA2 1983); United States v. Martinello, 556 F. 2d 1215, 1216 (CA5 1977); United States v. Figurski, 545 F. 2d 389, 391 (CA4 1976); United States v. Greathouse, 484 F. 2d 805, 807 (CA7 1973); United States v. Evans, 454 F. 2d 813, 819-820 (CA8), cert. denied, 406 U. S. 969 (1972).

 The Parole Commission has invoked this available exemption. See 28 CFR § 16.85(a)(2) (1987). With respect to presentence reports in particular, the regulations provide that requests “must be directed to the appropriate court.” § 2.56(b). It is this regulation, rather than the Court’s holding today, which genuinely implements the intent of Rule 32(c) — that copies of the report can be retained only with the permission of the sentencing court.