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Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Ind. Courts - Sealed documents in otherwise "unsealed" cases

In this Feb. 6th entry, the ILB reported on the case of John Doe v. Town of Plainfield, Indiana, an interlocutory appeal from the trial court’s grant of the Town of Plainfield’s motion to reconsider an earlier order that had allowed Doe to proceed anonymously. After checking the Clerk of the Courts' online docket for the case, I wrote:

Oddly, no record of this case (32A01-0605-CV-188) appears in the Clerk of the Courts' docket. Surely that is not part of the authorization to proceed anonymously.
Last week I contacted the Clerk of the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, and Tax Court for the State of Indiana, Kevin S. Smith, to find out why the case was not listed in the public docket.

The answer, it turns out, is that years ago, when the docket was simply an internal tool, entire unsealed cases which included sealed documents were not listed in the docket, as a way of flagging to staff the fact that the case contained information that was "under seal" and not to be freely distributed.

This assured that the staff did not inadvertently turn over a sealed document to someone coming into the Clerk's Office requesting to view "the entire record" in an otherwise unsealed case. This was never changed when the docket became on online public tool.

According to Mr. Smith, his office changed the internal policy several months ago "so that in the future only sealed cases would receive the 'sealed' notation on our electronic docket, finding that other internal procedures already in place for handling sealed documents in unsealed cases were sufficient to prevent inadvertent disclosure."

He said the Plainfield appeal I had asked about was processed by the Clerk's Office before the change. "It has been corrected now, so you should be able to find the docket in the case you're interested in. Thanks for bringing it to our attention."

This means that in the future the presence of sealed documents in unsealed cases will not prevent the case docket from being listed online. I've now checked again for the docket of the John Doe v. Plainfield case and find that it is now available online. A recent entry to the case's docket states:

1. APPELLANT'S MOTION TO FILE DOCUMENT UNDER SEAL IS GRANTED. 2. THE CLERK OF THE COURT OF APPEALS SHALL RELEASE EXHIBIT B ONLY TO THE PARTIES TO THE APPEAL AND THEIR RESPECTIVE COUNSEL OF RECORD. SAID EXHIBIT SHALL NOT BE MADE AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
Mr. Smith cautions, however:
[T]he new way we handle things will be prospective, as we have no way of knowing what cases were previously handled under the "old" way before I changed our practice. However, if those "old" cases (meaning those designated as "sealed" before I made the policy change) are brought to our attention like you did with the Doe v. Plainfield case, we can then make the adjustment to that case at that time.
What about "sealed" cases? What if a case, sealed by the trial court judge, is appealed? What shows up on the docket? Is even the existence of the appeal kept off the docket? More coming, perhaps tomorrow.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 13, 2007 02:56 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts