NIKKI BOLLINGER GRAE, et al. v. CORRECTIONS CORPORATION OF AMERICA, nka CoreCivic, et al., THE NASHVILLE BANNER - Articles

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NIKKI BOLLINGER GRAE, et al. v. CORRECTIONS CORPORATION OF AMERICA, nka CoreCivic, et al., THE NASHVILLE BANNER

Posted by: Azya Thornton on Apr 17, 2025

Court: 6th Circuit Court (Published Opinions)

Attorneys 1: ARGUED: Wendy Liu, PUBLIC CITIZEN LITIGATION GROUP, Washington, D.C., for Appellant.

Attorneys 2: Milton S. McGee, III, RILEY & JACOBSON, PLC, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellees.

Attorneys 3: ON BRIEF: Wendy Liu, Adina H. Rosenbaum, PUBLIC CITIZEN LITIGATION GROUP, Washington, D.C., Daniel A. Horwitz, HORWITZ LAW, PLLC, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellant.

Attorneys 4: ON BRIEF: Milton S. McGee, III, Steven A. Riley, Joshua S. Bolian, RILEY & JACOBSON, PLC, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellees.

Judge(s): United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee at Nashville

Court Appealed: McKEAGUE, KETHLEDGE, and READLER, Circuit Judges

KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge. The federal courts do their business in public—which means the public is presumptively entitled to review every document that a party files with the court for purposes of influencing a judicial decision. Thus, under rules long settled in this circuit, “[o]nly the most compelling reasons can justify non-disclosure of judicial records.” Shane Group, Inc. v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mich., 825 F.3d 299, 305 (6th Cir. 2016) (quoting In re Knoxville News-Sentinel Co., Inc., 723 F.2d 470, 476 (6th Cir. 1983)). And when a court does seal off judicial records from public view, it must explain “why the interests in support of nondisclosure are compelling, why the interests supporting access are less so, and why the seal itself is no broader than necessary[.]” Id. at 306. None of these rules were honored here. CoreCivic, for its part, largely elided them in its filings with the district court. And the district court repeatedly sealed off documents that the parties themselves (or just one of them) had deemed “confidential”—thereby shielding from public view all kinds of information about how the defendant corporation ran its prisons. For the most part the court did so merely by electronically stamping the first page of each motion to seal. Eventually a local newspaper, the Nashville Banner, intervened and sought to unseal broad swaths of the court record; but the court kept under seal every document that the parties asked it to. The Banner now appeals the district court’s refusal to unseal 24 deposition transcripts in particular. We vacate the court’s order to that extent and remand for a prompt decision in accordance with our precedents.

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