From Eleventh Circuit Judge Andrew Brasher, joined by Judges Kevin Newsom and Ed Carnes, in Wednesday's Brooks v. City of Southside:
Brooks [a pseudonym] alleged violations of the United States Constitution and Alabama state law related to his arrest and prosecution…. The district court allowed Brooks to file a motion under seal to explain why he should be allowed to proceed anonymously. Brooks did so, and he revealed sensitive, personal information that he thought would come up during the litigation.
The district court discussed the sensitive information in Brooks's filing in a public order and then gave him the choice of filing a non-anonymous complaint or dropping his suit. Brooks asked the district court to reconsider its order and to seal it, arguing that the district court's public order undermined its conclusion that the information he filed under seal would not be disclosed in the litigation. The district court declined to reconsider its order, but it granted Brooks's request to seal it.
The district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Brooks's initial request to proceed anonymously. The district court properly invoked our presumption against anonymous pleading, and it applied the right test from our precedents. The district court reasonably concluded that the litigation would not require Brooks to disclose information of the utmost intimacy or admit that he intended to engage in illegal conduct.
But we believe the district court abused its direction in denying Brooks's reconsideration motion without explaining how the disclosure of his allegedly sensitive information affected its analysis. The district court's ruling on Brooks's initial anonymity motion was based, in large part, on the premise that Brooks would not be compelled to disclose in the litigation the sensitive information that he had filed under seal. But, after inviting Brooks to file that same information under seal, the district court's public order did disclose that sensitive information on the public docket. The district court did not explain how that change in circumstances played into its decision, and we cannot conduct that analysis in the first instance. Accordingly, we vacate the district court's order and remand for further proceedings….
