Pitch v. United States, No. 17-15016

• Decision Date: 27 March 2020
• Docket Number: No. 17-15016
• Citation: 953 F.3d 1226
• Parties: Marion E. PITCH, The Personal Representative of the Estate of Anthony S. Pitch, Plaintiff – Appellee, Laura Wexler, Intervenor, v. UNITED STATES of America, Defendant – Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

953 F.3d 1226

Marion E. PITCH, The Personal Representative of the Estate of Anthony S. Pitch, Plaintiff – Appellee,Laura Wexler, Intervenor,

v.UNITED STATES of America, Defendant – Appellant.

No. 17-15016

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

March 27, 2020

Joseph J. Bell, Bell Shivas & Fasolo, PC, Rockaway, NJ, for Plaintiff - Appellee.

Bradley Hinshelwood, U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Staff, Mark R. Freeman, Michael Raab, U.S. Attorney General's Office, Washington, DC, William Taylor McNeill, U.S. Attorney Service - Middle District of Georgia, U.S. Attorney's Office, Macon, GA, Defendant - Appellant.

Joseph J. Bell, Bell Shivas & Fasolo, PC, Rockaway, NJ , for Intervenor.

Allison M. Zieve, Patrick Daniel Llewellyn, Public Citizen Litigation Group, Washington, DC, for Amici Curiae American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, National Security Archive and Society of American Archivists.

Ashwin Pradyumna Phatak, Constitutional Accountability Center, Washington, DC, for Amicus Curiae Constitutional Accountability Center.

Richard J. Ovelmen, David Arnold Karp, Carlton Fields, PA, Miami, FL, for Amicus Curiae Gilbert King and the First Amendment.

KatieLynn Boyd Townsend, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Washington, DC, for Amicus Curiae Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Allison M. Zieve, Public Citizen Litigation Group, Washington, DC, for Amicus Curiae Organization of American Historians.

Before ED CARNES, Chief Judge, WILSON, WILLIAM PRYOR, MARTIN, JORDAN, ROSENBAUM, JILL PRYOR, NEWSOM, BRANCH, GRANT, TJOFLAT, and MARCUS, Circuit Judges.^*

TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge:

The grand jury, as an institution, has long been understood as a "constitutional fixture in its own right," operating independently of any branch of the federal government. United States v. Williams , 504 U.S. 36, 47, 112 S. Ct. 1735, 1742, 118 L.Ed.2d 352 (1992) (internal quotation marks omitted). That independence allows the grand jury to serve as a buffer between the government and the people with respect to the enforcement of the criminal law. But the ability of the grand jury to serve this purpose depends upon maintaining the secrecy of its proceedings. The long-established policy of upholding the secrecy of the grand jury helps to protect the innocent accused from facing unfounded charges, encourages full and frank testimony on the part of witnesses, and prevents interference with the grand jury's deliberations. See Douglas Oil Co. v. Petrol Stops Nw. , 441 U.S. 211, 219, 99 S. Ct. 1667, 1673, 60 L.Ed.2d 156 (1979).

Rule 6 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which governs matters related to the grand jury, continues this traditional practice of secrecy. In particular, Rule 6(e) codifies the traditional rule of grand jury secrecy and provides a comprehensive framework for determining whether and under what conditions the records of grand jury proceedings may be released. The issue we must decide is whether a district court may order the release of grand jury materials in circumstances not explicitly covered by Rule 6(e).

In this case, Anthony S. Pitch, an author and historian, petitioned the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia for the grand jury transcripts related to the Moore's Ford Lynching—a horrific event involving the murders of two African American couples for which no one has ever been charged—to be used in his book about the lynching. His request admittedly did not fall within any of Rule 6(e) ’s stated exceptions to the general rule of grand jury secrecy. The District Court nonetheless granted his petition, relying on our decision in In re Petition to Inspect & Copy Grand Jury Materials (Hastings) , 735 F.2d 1261 (11th Cir. 1984). In Hastings , we held that a district court may, pursuant to its inherent, supervisory power over the grand jury, authorize the disclosure of grand jury records outside of Rule 6(e) ’s enumerated exceptions in certain "exceptional circumstances." Id. at 1268–69. Here, the District Court found that the historical significance of the grand jury's investigation, and the critical role the records of that investigation would play in enhancing the historical record on this tragic event, amounted to "exceptional circumstances" that justified the Court's use of its inherent power to order disclosure. In re Pitch , 275 F. Supp. 3d 1373, 1383 (M.D. Ga. 2017), aff'd sub nom. Pitch v. United States , 915 F.3d 704 (11th Cir. 2019), reh'g en banc granted, opinion vacated, 925 F.3d 1224 (11th Cir. 2019).

A panel of this Court, "bound by our decision in Hastings ," affirmed the District Court's exercise of its inherent, supervisory power to authorize disclosure of grand jury records outside the confines of Rule 6(e) for matters of historical significance. 915 F.3d at 707 ; see also id. at 713 (Jordan, J., concurring) ("Given our decision in Hastings , I do not see how we can say that the district court abused its discretion in relying on its inherent authority."). We reheard the case en banc to reconsider our holding in Hastings —that district courts have inherent power to go beyond the exceptions listed in Rule 6(e) —and to determine whether, if such inherent power does exist, district courts may exercise that power to recognize an exception to grand jury secrecy for matters of historical significance. We now hold that Rule 6(e) is exhaustive, and that district courts do not possess inherent, supervisory power to authorize the disclosure of grand jury records outside of Rule 6(e)(3) ’s enumerated exceptions. We therefore overrule our holding in Hastings to the contrary.

I.

To appreciate why Pitch is seeking the grand jury records in a decades-old case, we begin by describing the incident that prompted the grand jury's investigation and the continued interest in that investigation. In July 1946, a crowd of people in Walton and Oconee Counties, Georgia gathered as two African American couples were dragged from a car and brutally murdered in what some consider to be the last mass lynching in American history. The event, known as the Moore's Ford Lynching, sparked national outrage and eventually led both the Georgia Bureau of Investigation ("GBI") and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") to investigate the murders. In late 1946, after approximately four months of investigation, a federal grand jury was convened in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia in Athens. The grand jury heard sixteen days of testimony from countless witnesses, but nonetheless failed to charge anyone with the murders. The case remains unsolved.

The circumstances surrounding the Moore's Ford Lynching, and especially the grand jury's failure to indict, continue to draw attention from activists and scholars alike. The Moore's Ford Memorial Committee—a group of politicians, civil rights activists, and victims’ relatives—gather each year to lead a rally and a reenactment in honor of the victims. The GBI and FBI have reopened their investigations into the lynching several times over the past seven decades, but to no avail. More recently, in 2007, over three thousand pages of the FBI investigation file were released to the public under a Freedom of Information Act request. The records of the proceedings before the 1946 grand jury are one of the few records related to the Moore's Ford Lynching that remain sealed.

Enter Anthony S. Pitch. Pitch was a historian who authored several books about major historic events, such as President Abraham Lincoln's assassination and the British invasion of Washington in 1814. His latest work, published in March 2016, focused on the Moore's Ford Lynching. Seeking additional source material for his book, Pitch petitioned the District Court in 2014 to unseal the federal grand jury records related to the Moore's Ford Lynching. The District Court initially denied the petition because there was no evidence that the records existed. Pitch renewed his petition in 2017, after learning that the transcripts of the grand jury testimony may be located at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The District Court ordered the Government to produce the records for in camera inspection, and the Government filed the transcripts under seal.

This time, the District Court granted Pitch's request and ordered the transcripts unsealed. Although the District Court acknowledged that "Pitch's request does not fit within any of Rule 6(e) ’s exceptions," it invoked its inherent power to release the transcripts under our reasoning in Hastings . 275 F. Supp. 3d at 1381–83.

In Hastings , the Judicial Investigating Committee of the Eleventh Circuit sought access to the records of the grand jury that had indicted District Judge Alcee Hastings on bribery charges—charges for which Hastings was later tried and acquitted—to determine whether Hastings should be disciplined for violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct. 735 F.2d at 1263. We noted¹ that the Committee's request did not quite fall within the exception in then- Rule 6(e)(3)(C)(i) —now Rule 6(e)(3)(E)(i) —for disclosures, "preliminarily to or in connection with a judicial proceeding," since the investigation of Hastings was not a judicial proceeding in the "strict legal sense." Id. at 1271–72.² Nonetheless, we held that the District Court properly exercised its inherent, supervisory power over the grand jury to authorize release of the materials outside the strict bounds of Rule 6(e). Id. at 1272.³ In doing so, we explained that Rule 6(e) ’s exceptions "were not intended to ossify the law, but rather are subject to development by the courts in conformance with the rule's general rule of secrecy." Id. at 1269 (citing Fallen v. United States , 378 U.S. 139, 142, 84 S. Ct. 1689, 1691, 12 L.Ed.2d 760 (1964) ). District courts therefore retained "inherent power beyond the literal wording of Rule 6(e)" to authorize disclosure of grand jury materials not explicitly covered by the...