Lumiere v. United States
- Barbara Moses
- 1:18-cv-09170
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In Lumiere v. United States, Judge Moses denied sealing of a relative’s affidavit and denied other filing requests as moot.
Stefan Lumiere, the Relative, the non-parties whose affidavits were filed, and members of the public seeking access to the court records.
What happened
Lumiere v. United States concerned an unrepresented petitioner’s filings supporting his request to challenge his sentence. He asked to keep an affidavit from a relative and a related appendix confidential, citing possible professional harm and concern about potential witnesses.
The court found that these concerns did not overcome the strong presumption that court documents should be publicly accessible. It also noted that the relative’s identity had appeared elsewhere on the public docket and that the appendix did not identify the potential witnesses by name.
Judge Barbara Moses denied the request to file the relative’s unredacted affidavit under seal. She gave Lumiere until December 4, 2019, to file it publicly if he wanted the court to consider it, and said previously filed versions would otherwise be struck. The requests to refile the reply papers and replace certain affidavits were denied as moot.
The detailed version
- Lumiere v. United States · No. 1:18-cv-09170
- Barbara Moses
- Nov. 27, 2019
Background
Stefan Lumiere, an unrepresented petitioner, was pursuing a motion under Section 2255, a federal procedure for asking the sentencing court to vacate, set aside, or correct a sentence. His reply papers were due November 12, 2019, but he filed documents on November 18 under the description “Petitioner's Surreply.” He later said the papers had been filed in a confusing order and asked to refile them properly. He then filed additional versions, including a memorandum, his affidavit, a 319-page appendix, and affidavits from nine non-parties.
One affidavit came from a relative identified in the opinion only as “the Relative.” Before filing it, Lumiere obscured the Relative’s name, the precise relationship to Lumiere, and an appendix listing people the Relative had contacted or tried to contact about providing affidavits. Lumiere and the Relative jointly asked the court to place the unredacted affidavit and related material under seal, meaning to restrict public access to those documents.
Sealing request
Judge Barbara Moses explained that the person seeking to seal a court document bears the burden of showing that sealing is justified. The court applied the strong presumption of public access to judicial documents. It ruled that general concerns about professional embarrassment, adverse publicity, or possible future employment effects were insufficient to overcome that presumption.
The court also was not persuaded that the proposed redactions would effectively conceal the Relative’s identity because the Relative’s name had already appeared elsewhere on the public docket, and the publicly filed version described the Relative’s recent employment history in detail. The court rejected the concern that disclosure of the appendix might alienate potential witnesses. It noted that the appendix did not include actual witness names and instead referred to them as “Witness 1,” “Witness 2,” and so on.
Rulings
The court denied Lumiere’s letter-application to file the unredacted version of the Relative’s affidavit under seal. If Lumiere wanted the court to consider the affidavit in connection with his Section 2255 motion, he had to refile it unredacted by December 4, 2019. The court stated that, if the deadline passed, it would strike all previously filed versions of the affidavit from the record.
The court also denied as moot Lumiere’s November 20 request for permission to refile his reply papers in proper form, except as limited by the sealing ruling. It likewise denied as moot his November 26 request to strike the earlier version of the non-party affidavits and substitute the corrected versions. The Clerk of Court was directed to close those two applications. The opinion did not decide the merits of Lumiere’s Section 2255 motion.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.