The Work of Our Courts Is Public Business, but Not All of That Business Should Be Made Public

From In re Marriage of Patel & Yendru, decided Friday by the Kansas Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Hill, joined by Justice Kathryn Gardner and District Judge Joan Lowdon:

The work of our courts is public business, but not all of that business should be made public. There are reasonable limits to the public disclosures of some court records. Trade secrets, military secrets, and facts that their revelation would serve no other purpose but to promote scandal and public embarrassment may be protected from public scrutiny. Thus, by law, a court may seal some court records….

Patel [the mother] and Yendru [the father], who are both successful doctors in the Wichita area, divorced in 2011 when their child, A.Y., was four years old…. In May 2024, A.Y. was set to graduate high school, and the graduation fell on Yendru’s weekend for parenting time. Patel requested that she have A.Y. at her house from Thursday-Sunday of graduation weekend; Patel had already scheduled a party with A.Y.’s friends on that Saturday and A.Y. knew of the event. On March 26, the case manager recommended that the parents split the weekend—Friday and Saturday with Patel; Sunday and Monday with Yendru….

Yendru objected …. [His motion] included a portion with the heading “Special Circumstances” in which Yendru alleged improper conduct by Patel for events that occurred 13 years before the motion was heard. It is this special circumstance portion of the record that is sealed….

{Yendru never set [the] motion for a hearing.} [On June 12, 2024 the court] overruled Yendru’s motions as moot because the graduation had already passed and the court no longer had jurisdiction over A.Y. because he was now 18 years old…. [T]he court ordered Yendru’s motion be placed under protective seal—upon its own motion—allowing only the court, the attorneys for the parties, and the parties to have access to them.

{Yendru now appeals—but only the district court’s order sealing the motion. He wants his motion with all of his allegations open to anyone who chooses to read it.} …

[Under our sealing statute,] “… Good cause to close a proceeding or seal or redact records, whether upon the motion of a party, or on the court’s own motion, does not exist unless the court makes a finding on the record that there exists an identified safety, property or privacy interest of a litigant or a public or private harm that predominates the case and such interest or harm outweighs the strong public interest in access to the court record and proceedings.”

Even though the court entered this order on its own motion and did not identify any specific privacy interest it was protecting in this order, we think it did so implicitly. It seems to us to be an attempt to enforce its prior order concerning a deposition.

In 2011, the district court ordered that the deposition involving questions of an affair by Patel “not be used outside this proceeding and may not be disseminated by either party or counsel.” Yet it was these same allegations that Yendru pointed to in arguing against Patel’s response to his motion about visitation 13 years later. Frankly, we fail to see how these old claims of an affair affect how visitation should be divided at the time of their son’s graduation.

We see no real public interest at stake here…. We also see no abuse of discretion here….