Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-15-02912/USCOURTS-ca7-15-02912-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 555
Nature of Suit: Prisoner - Prison Condition
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Submitted June 30, 2016*

Decided July 25, 2016

Before

WILLIAM J. BAUER, Circuit Judge

JOEL M. FLAUM, Circuit Judge

MICHAEL S. KANNE, Circuit Judge

No. 15-2912

WYNSTON DAY,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

STACI ARBUCKLE, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District 

Court for the Southern District of Illinois.

No. 14-cv-00971-MJR-SCW

Michael J. Reagan,

Chief Judge.

O R D E R

Wynston Day, an Illinois prisoner, appeals the grant of summary judgment for the 

defendant prison officials in this civil-rights suit on grounds that he failed to exhaust 

administrative remedies. We affirm the judgment.

Day brought this suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, asserting primarily that a nurse and two

correctional officers at Lawrence Correctional Center acted with deliberate indifference 

to his serious medical needs. He alleged, for instance, that while he was on suicide 

watch, a nurse facilitated his suicide attempt through overdose by allowing him to hoard 

medication. When he reported this attempted overdose, allegedly a guard ignored him. 

 * After examining the briefs and the record, we have concluded that oral argument is unnecessary. Thus 

the appeal is submitted on the briefs and the record. See FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C).

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1

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No. 15-2912 Page 2

The following month he tried to overdose again, and his subsequent efforts to inform 

two guards of the attempt either went ignored or prompted taunts against him. Around 

this time, Day added, a third correctional officer used excessive force against him. This 

officer allegedly taunted him and on one occasion intentionally slammed the cell door’s 

chuckhole on his hands, which he had been instructed to stretch out for handcuffing.

Day further alleged how his efforts to grieve his complaints to institutional 

authorities were thwarted. As he described in his complaint, he sent an emergency 

grievance to the warden on March 25 but received no response. One week later, on April 

2, he filed a regular grievance with the grievance counselor, but this too went 

unanswered. Soon thereafter he sent a grievance straight to the Administrative Review 

Board (ARB) and addressed letters about the prison’s unresponsiveness to the 

then-director of the Illinois Department of Corrections and Lawrence’s head of grievance 

counselors. The ARB returned his grievance, informing him that he needed first to 

obtain responses to his initial grievances from the grievance counselor, the grievance 

officer, and the warden.1

The defendants moved for summary judgment based on Day’s failure to exhaust his 

administrative remedies before filing suit. See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). They argued that the 

prison’s grievance records from the relevant period show that Day filed only one 

grievance, on March 6—and that this grievance did not relate to the incidents described 

in the § 1983 complaint. Moreover, according to the defendants, a search of the ARB’s 

records reflected that another of Day’s grievances had been returned because he did not

first obtain the requisite responses to his initial grievances from officers at the facility.

Day responded by maintaining that he submitted grievances which went 

unanswered. 

Whether Day complied with the prison’s grievance process, and thereby exhausted

his administrative remedies, was the subject of an evidentiary hearing conducted by a 

magistrate judge, see Pavey v. Conley, 544 F.3d 739 (7th Cir. 2008). Day testified that he put 

his grievances “in the door to be picked up” by officers. But a grievance counselor also 

testified that if he had received a grievance or complaint about an unanswered

grievance, he would have made a notation in the prison’s grievance-record system. And

there was no record of the grievances that Day said he submitted, testified another 

grievance counselor. 

 1 Day supplemented his complaint with copies of the grievances and letters that he said he sent, as well as 

the response from the ARB, but he did not attach the March 25 emergency grievance, of which he said he 

had not made a copy before sending.

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In a report and recommendation, the magistrate judge recommended that summary 

judgment be granted because the testimony of Day’s grievance counselor that he had not 

received any grievances from Day was more credible than Day’s testimony that prison 

officials thwarted his attempts to exhaust his remedies. The judge also spotlighted the

ways in which the grievances Day attached to his complaint did not match his account of 

his attempts to exhaust. None of the attached grievances, for instance, bore a date 

matching the days Day alleged that he had submitted grievances, and the attached 

grievances bearing a March date “should not exist” because he had denied in his 

complaint ever making a copy of his March grievance. Moreover, Day—in another 

lawsuit he filed in the Central District against prison officials at a different facility—had 

similarly alleged deliberate indifference and an “identical stream of obstruction.”

Day objected to the magistrate judge’s report and recommendation, but the district 

judge adopted it in its entirety and granted summary judgment for the defendants.

Agreeing with the magistrate judge that Day’s testimony and documentary evidence 

were internally inconsistent, the district judge found no basis to overturn the magistrate 

judge’s credibility findings, particularly when the magistrate judge was able to observe 

the testimony of both Day and the grievance counselor, who reported never receiving 

any of Day’s grievances.

On appeal Day challenges the district court’s decision to credit the grievance 

counselor’s testimony over his own. We review this finding for clear error, see FED. R.

CIV. P. 52(a)(6); Pavey v. Conley, 663 F.3d 899, 904 (7th Cir. 2011), though we’ve remarked 

that “determinations of witness credibility can virtually never be clear error,” 

United States v. Biggs, 491 F.3d 616, 621 (7th Cir. 2007) (internal quotation marks and 

citation omitted). The magistrate judge’s determination was not clearly erroneous 

because it was based on a permissible inference from the record, which lacked any 

evidence that a grievance counselor had received Day’s grievances or that Day ever had 

complained to the counselor about not receiving responses.

AFFIRMED.

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