Court Opinion

ID: 9468223
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:08:18.874969+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:45.357724
License: Public Domain

SNEED, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
On appellant’s motion, and with the government’s concurrence, the majority has agreed to substitute a pseudonym for appellant’s true name throughout our opinion. The appellant claims this is necessary to protect him from retaliation in prison for his cooperation with the government, which is described in our opinion. It is from this substitution of a pseudonym that I dissent.
Generally court proceedings should be conducted in public and when so conducted there is normally no justification for not reflecting in any appellate opinion the parties as they were known in the proceeding below. To do otherwise must be regarded as a departure from the strong tradition of publicity in the courts and should be limited to the “unusual case.” See Doe v. Des-champs, 64 F.R.D. 652, 653 (D.Mont.1974) (three-judge court). In my view this is not such a case. Here the appellant made his arrangement with the government and now seeks to avoid one of the predictable consequences of his cooperation. Whatever its structure that arrangement did not include assurances of anonymity, nor would it bind this court if it had. We should decline to add to the government’s storehouse of tools with which to procure the cooperation of witnesses and informants when to do so compromises the openness of the courts. *930Our hesitancy should be all the greater in a case such as this one in which anonymity at this late date is of dubious effectiveness.
Beyond the arguments based on reason, no statute or federal rule authorizes the practice approved by the majority. No reported case of which I am aware approves of such a practice on facts similar to these or in the procedural posture in which the appellant’s motion came to us.1 We should not lay the foundation here.

. Of the cases cited to us by the parties, the vast majority concerned instances in which anonymity was closely connected to the very rights asserted by the party requesting it. In these cases the plaintiffs were required to reveal information of an intimate and personal nature in order to vindicate constitutional or statutory rights grounded in the protection of privacy. See, e. g., Doe v. Deschamps, supra, and cases cited therein. There is some logic in cooperating to provide anonymity when publicity would inflict the very injury the litigant seeks to avoid by resort to the courts. The practice of providing pseudonyms should be extended to other situations only rarely. See Southern Methodist University Association of Women Law Students v. Wynne & Jaffe, 599 F.2d 707, 712-13 (5th Cir. 1979); Lindsey v. Dayton-Hudson Corp., 592 F.2d 1118, 1125 (10th Cir. 1979).
The other cases cited by the parties are distinguishable from this one. In Doe v. Civiletti, 635 F.2d 88 (2d Cir. 1980), the plaintiff sought reinstatement in the government’s Witness Protection Program, authorized by Title V of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, Pub. L.No.91-452, §§ 501, 502, 84 Stat. 933, reprinted in 18 U.S.C. at p. 1327 (1976). There is, once again, some logic in providing anonymity when anonymity is closely connected to the statutory claim sought to be vindicated. While the government might have enrolled appellant in the Witness Protection Program here, it did not do so. The court in Civiletti also referred to the plaintiffs husband, who had also cooperated with the government, by pseudonym for “reasons of security.” Id. at 90. The court did not elaborate, but the marital tie to the plaintiff under the circumstances of the case may have been sufficient reason. Without more, Civiletti should provide no aid to appellant.
In United States v. Indian Boy X, 565 F.2d 585 (9th Cir. 1977), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 841, 99 S.Ct. 131, 58 L.Ed.2d 139 (1978), this court did allow the appellant to use a pseudonym. However, the appellant was challenging his conviction for juvenile delinquency and the court grounded its decision to protect the identity of the juvenile in the “spirit of the Juvenile Delinquency Act.” Id. at 587 n.4. No similar statutory policy favors the appellant’s case here. Finally, Doe v. State Bar, 415 F.Supp. 308 (N.D.Cal.1976), aff’d, 582 F.2d 25 (9th Cir. 1978), was a suit to enjoin disciplinary proceedings against an attorney. The plaintiff was allowed to maintain his anonymity in state court proceedings before commencing his federal action. Although the district court used a pseudonym for plaintiff in its opinion, it expressed the “great disfavor” with which it viewed the practice and expressly declined to address the question in light of its disposition. Id. at 309 n. 1.
None of these cases persuades me that we should extend to the appellant the shroud of anonymity that we would deny to the ordinary litigant in federal court.