FEDERAL COURT, June 29 — In the District of
Colorado, Inner City Press filed a motion to intervene in
Preciado v. RugsUSA, LLC, 1:25-cv-01243-CNS-KAS (D.
Colo.), opposing a June 25 motion by the plaintiff to
restrict nine documents — including Daubert opposition
briefs and deposition excerpts from the defendant's
witnesses — based solely on the defendant's
confidentiality designations under a private protective
order. That motion has now been docketed by Judge
Charlotte N. Sweeney's court.
The motion argues that a party's
designation in a discovery protective order does not
automatically satisfy the legal standard for sealing
judicial documents, and asks the court to direct public
re-filing with narrower redactions.
By contrast in the District
of Columbia and the District of Connecticut, similar
requests have disappeared into the void for now — one
ignored since June 4, the other docketed with proof of
service but met with no response even as the underlying
criminal sentencing came and went. In Jones v. United
Airlines, Inc., 1:24-cv-03013-NYW-NRN (D. Colo.),
Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter held a hearing on
Inner City Press's access request and ordered United
Airlines to re-file 29 sealed exhibits by July 17, 2026
— with names of comparator employees redacted, but with
race information retained and public. The underlying
case is a race discrimination suit brought by Antonio
Jones, and Judge Neureiter found that the public
interest in transparency about the evidence supporting
such claims outweighed the company's preference for
secrecy.
This is what the First Amendment and common law
right of access are supposed to look like in practice. The
contrast with two other districts is striking. In the
District of Columbia, Inner City Press opened a
miscellaneous case, In re Sealed and Redacted Filings in
United States v. Al-Marimi, 1:26-mc-00089 (D.D.C.),
assigned to Judge Dabney Langhorne Friedrich. The case was
filed June 4, 2026. The government's brief was due June
26. As of this writing, no order has issued, no
acknowledgment has appeared on the docket, and no response
to the access request has been forthcoming. In the
District of Connecticut, Inner City Press filed a motion
in United States v. Sakal, 3:25-cr-00222 (D. Conn.),
before Judge Kari Anne Dooley, seeking access to sealed
sentencing materials. The motion has been docketed, and
proof of service is on file. Defendant Salim Sakal was
sentenced on June 22, 2026. The sealed materials Inner
City Press sought to access relate to proceedings that are
now concluded. Still no action from Judge Dooley's
chambers. Courts that take press access requests seriously
— docketing them, referring them to the parties,
scheduling hearings — are fulfilling their obligations
under the First Amendment and the common law. Courts that
allow such requests to go unacknowledged for weeks,
particularly after underlying proceedings have concluded,
are not.
Inner City Press will continue to monitor
all four dockets and report on any developments.
