FEDERAL COURT, July 24 – Colorado
remains the one federal district that posts every motion
to seal on its own public website with a deadline to
object, and it remains the district where Inner City Press
has had its most success this year.
But three cases now sitting side by side on
Colorado's docket show a system that works only when
someone keeps pushing, and where a single judge's
misreading of a local rule can undo the model
entirely. The good hearing, and the missing
follow-through. In Jones v. United Airlines, Magistrate
Judge N. Reid Neureiter first approved United's unopposed
motion to restrict its own summary judgment exhibits on
May 28, 2026 — the same day it was filed, before the
fourteen-day window for anyone to object had even run.
It took Inner City Press's timely
opposition, filed within that window, to bring the
question back before the Court. On June 24, after a
hearing at which "Mr. Matthew R. Lee from Inner City
Press" appeared alongside counsel for both sides, Judge
Neureiter reversed course: he sustained Inner City Press's
objections to restricting three sets of exhibits, and
denied both parties' sealing motions outright. Counsel
were ordered to file redacted, public versions by July 17,
2026. That date has now passed. Nothing has been filed.
Inner City Press has written to United's counsel asking
for a status update — not as a precondition to anything,
simply to find out what happened before deciding what
comes next.
The ill-informed ruling
Days later, in a different case, United
States v. Ba — a denaturalization matter in which the
government sought to restrict all ten exhibits to its
complaint the day it was filed — Magistrate Judge Cyrus Y.
Chung denied Inner City Press's objection without reaching
the merits at all, holding that the objection itself
violated D.C.COLO.LCivR 7.1(a) for failing to confer with
the government first.
The ruling did not explain how a non-party
press objector, asserting a public right of access
independent of either litigant, is meant to "confer" with
a party whose position is that the material should not be
public in the first place — nor did it grapple with the
timing problem: this Court, including in this very case,
has approved sealing motions the same day they were filed,
often before any deadline to object has run.
A conferral requirement applied to the
public is not a technicality; in practice, it can
foreclose timely objection altogether. Judge Chung's
substantive ruling on the underlying privacy question was
measured and time-limited — restriction only until
September 14, with real teeth requiring specificity in any
extension — and Inner City Press intends to let that
timeline run rather than fight the conferral point in that
case directly.
The new test
Instead, the conferral question is being
tested in a third case, United States v. Torres, a money
laundering prosecution in which the government's own
motion to restrict recites textbook conferral:
"undersigned counsel has discussed this request to
restrict with counsel for Defendant Ritter. Counsel did
not object." That is what Rule 7.1(a) is for — two
parties, in an ongoing adversarial relationship, working
out a routine motion between themselves.
Inner City Press has now filed an objection
in Torres to the government's motion to restrict both a
document and the brief explaining why it should be sealed
— without conferring with the government, and without
conferring with defendant Torres or his counsel either.
Neither the prosecution nor the defense in a money
laundering case is the public's negotiating partner on a
question of public access; the objection says so,
directly, and asks Judge Chung's colleagues on this bench
to treat a non-party press motion the way courts around
the country already do: dockets, hearings, timely
findings, no conferral required. Watch this site
