The ACLU of Connecticut intervened to obtain copies of certain trial exhibits in Mustafa v. Byars. In the case, plaintiff Justin Mustafa alleged that defendant Stephen Byars hit him and caused permanent nerve damage when Mustafa was incarcerated and Byars was a guard at the Garner prison. Mustafa brought suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. About six weeks before trial, both parties notified the court that they intended to show the jury videos recorded inside of the prison, and that no party objected to the videos’ introduction into evidence. Neither Mustafa nor Byars moved to seal the videos, close the courtroom, or limit the public’s access to the videos in any way.
At the four-day trial, both parties used the videos extensively. The jury returned a $1.3m verdict for Mustafa.
Five weeks after the verdict, the ACLU of Connecticut requested copies of the videos shown at trial. After some weeks’ delay, the district court ordered the parties to brief their positions on the ACLU’s request, even though the videos were not sealed and therefore presumptively available to the public.
Byars’s various filings claimed that public dissemination of the video--which he himself had shown in open court--could be damaging to Connecticut’s prison system, because incarcerated people could study the videos to learn the layout of the very prison in which they reside.
Four months after the ACLU requested the trial exhibits, the District of Connecticut issued a decision concluding that the exhibits are judicial documents subject to the common law and First Amendment rights of access, and ordering Byars’s counsel to provide access to them. But the court forbade the ACLU from making copies of the exhibits, positing that the possibility of the videos’ being preserved forever on the Internet poses the danger that the public could view the internal workings of a prison.
The ACLU of Connecticut has appealed.
