Inmate loses appeal under Prison Litigation Reform Act

Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, inmates cannot file a lawsuit unless their file an internal grievance at the correctional facility. Once that grievance is denied, the inmates can then bring the lawsuit. The idea is that the grievance procedure may reduce the number of inmate lawsuits because the jail might correct the problem without litigation. It all sounds simple, but this case shows that it's not always that simple.

The case is Grafton v. Hesse, a summary order issued on August 29. Plaintiff says he wanted to file a grievance, but the jail did not make the process available to him. Here is the law on that issue, from the Supreme Court's ruling in Ross v. Blake (2016):

there are three circumstances in which an administrative remedy is unavailable: (1) “it operates as a simple dead end—with officers unable or consistently unwilling to provide any relief to aggrieved inmates;” (2) the remedy is “so opaque” that “no ordinary prisoner can make sense of what it demands;” and (3) “prison administrators thwart inmates from taking advantage of a grievance process through machination, misrepresentation, or intimidation.”

Plaintiff invokes the Ross exceptions because prison staff intimidated him and "put him and his co-plaintiffs 'under threat of retaliation' due to the grievances they had filed challenging prison conditions in the medical unit." This sounds like something that might happen in jail, but the Court of Appeals (Hall, Livingston and Restaini [on loan from the Court of International Trade]) is not buying it. Without affirmative measures taken by prison staff to thwart the grievance process, the inmate cannot claim that threats like this prevented him from filing a grievance. That's the rule in Ruggiero v. County of Orange, 467 F.3d 170 (2d Cir. 2006), a case that I briefed (and lost). Since "Grafton and his co-plaintiffs, in their complaint, pleaded that they had filed grievances subsequent to the staff members’ threats," he was never actually prevented from filing a grievance." While plaintiff also argues that prison staff "were consistently unwilling to provide relief and that the grievance system was a 'dead end with him being asked to supply documents that he did not have and grievances not being collected and processed as required," that argument also fails. The Court reasons:

Grafton has not provided any evidence regarding the outcome of his past grievances and indicating if or how other NCCC inmates’ grievances had been resolved. The evidence Grafton does provide—several of his past grievances containing the notation “Grievance Accepted”—undermines his argument that prison staff had made the prison grievance system a dead end by not collecting and processing grievances as required.