Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-14-02983/USCOURTS-ca7-14-02983-0/pdf.json

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

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In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-2983

SHANE KERVIN,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

LA CLAIR BARNES, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Indiana, South Bend Division.

No. 3:14-cv-00379-JTM-CAN — James T. Moody, Judge.

____________________

SUBMITTED APRIL 14, 2015 — DECIDED MAY 29, 2015

____________________

Before POSNER, FLAUM, and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge. Shane Kervin, an inmate of an Indiana prison, appeals the dismissal of his suit in which, invoking 42 U.S.C. § 1983, he alleges that prison officials violated his constitutional rights because of his insisting on being allowed to see his lawyer, who had come to the prison to 

speak with him. He contends that he was placed in segregation as punishment for insisting on keeping his appointment 

with the lawyer and denied his right to due process of law 

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when his attempts to seek redress through the prison’s 

grievance system for his wrongful punishment were thwarted by biased grievance officers. The district judge dismissed 

the suit on the pleadings.

A prison guard forbade Kervin to enter the prison’s visitation room to meet with his lawyer. (We’ve not been told the

purpose of the meeting.) The guard relented after some 

minutes and permitted the meeting, but according to Kervin 

told him he’d write up a false report and have him placed in 

segregation. And indeed it appears that Kervin was forced to 

serve up to 30 days in segregation and temporarily (we do 

not know for how long) denied telephone and commissary 

privileges—punishments that he says he was unable to avert

because of the hostility to him of the prison’s grievance officers.

The district judge gave Kervin two opportunities to 

amend his complaint in order to clarify his claims, but was 

dissatisfied with Kervin’s response and after screening the 

complaint pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1915A for nonfrivolous 

claims ruled that Kervin had failed to state a valid claim. The

complaint itself alleged that despite the guard’s threat to file 

a false report Kervin had been punished for defying the 

guard’s order by asking to be let out of the day room to meet 

with his lawyer after being told that he could not leave the

room just yet. So either the guard did not file a false report 

despite his threat to do so or the report was disregarded, for 

by Kervin’s own account it was not the basis of his punishment—his backtalk was. And backtalk by prison inmates to 

guards, like other speech that violates prison discipline, is 

not constitutionally protected. Ustrak v. Fairman, 781 F.2d 

573, 580 (7th Cir. 1986) (“We can imagine few things more 

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No. 14-2983 3

inimical to prison discipline than allowing prisoners to 

abuse guards and each other. The level of violence in American prisons makes it imperative that the authorities take effective steps to prevent provocation”); see also Watkins v. 

Kasper, 599 F.3d 791, 799 (7th Cir. 2010); Bridges v. Gilbert, 557 

F.3d 541, 551 (7th Cir. 2009); Gee v. Pacheco, 627 F.3d 1178, 

1187–88, 1191 (10th Cir. 2010).

Kervin further argues that he was punished not for his 

insubordinate speech but rather for meeting with, and presumably talking to, his lawyer, which he also claims was 

protected speech. But we aren’t told anything about the lawyer’s meeting with Kervin, and so we don’t know whether it 

involved any protected speech.

As for Kervin’s due process claim, the judge ruled that

neither the loss of privileges was a severe enough sanction,

nor his time in segregation long enough, to deprive him of 

any liberty protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The judge further ruled that Kervin’s claim against the allegedly hostile grievance officers failed because they had not 

blocked him from pursuing his grievances in court. The 

Prison Litigation Reform Act does not require a state to create a grievance procedure for its prison inmates, 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1997e(b), though if it does yet prevents a prisoner from utilizing it he will be excused from having to exhaust the grievance process as a prerequisite to suing in federal court on the 

ground that the grievance is of federal constitutional magnitude. Kaba v. Stepp, 458 F.3d 678, 684–86 (7th Cir. 2006). But 

the inadequacies of the grievance procedure itself, as distinct 

from its consequences, cannot form the basis for a constitutional claim. Bridges v. Gilbert, supra, 557 F.3d at 555; 

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Grieveson v. Anderson, 538 F.3d 763, 772–73 (7th Cir. 2008); 

Adams v. Rice, 40 F.3d 72, 75 (4th Cir. 1994).

The district judge rejected Kervin’s complaint about the 

grievance proceedings not because of Kervin’s ability to litigate his grievance, however, but rather because his stints in 

segregation and denial of telephone and commissary privileges were, the judge decided, neither “atypical” nor “significant,” hence not “a dramatic departure from the basic conditions of [the prisoner’s] sentence.” And so, consistently

with Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 484–85 (1995), from 

which we’ve been quoting, Kervin hadn’t been deprived of 

liberty.

The Supreme Court has noted that “in Sandin’s wake the 

Courts of Appeals have not reached consistent conclusions 

for identifying the baseline from which to measure what is 

atypical and significant in any particular prison system. This 

divergence indicates the difficulty of locating the appropriate baseline.” Wilkinson v. Austin, 545 U.S. 209, 223 (2005) (citations omitted). Compare Beverati v. Smith, 120 F.3d 500, 504 

(4th Cir. 1997), which thought disgusting conditions of administrative segregation not to be actionable because they 

had lasted for “only” six months, with Hatch v. District of Columbia, 184 F.3d 846, 858 (D.C. Cir. 1999), holding that 29 

weeks (a shade over six months) in administrative segregation could be actionable even though the conditions of segregation, although restrictive, were not unsanitary or otherwise disgusting, id. at 854—were not, as alleged in Beverati, 

“infested with vermin,” “smeared with human feces and 

urine,” “flooded with water from a leak in the toilet on the 

floor above,” etc. 120 F.3d at 504. Wilkerson v. Goodwin, 774 

F.3d 845, 853 (5th Cir. 2014), and Brown v. Oregon Department 

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of Corrections, 751 F.3d 983, 988 (9th Cir. 2014), sensibly suggest that the severity of treatment should be combined with 

its duration in assessing the gravity of the conditions complained of by the prisoner. See also Keenan v. Hall, 83 F.3d 

1083, 1089 (9th Cir. 1996). But this need not imply that a rigid 

six-month period of inhuman confinement is a condition 

precedent to a deprivation of a prisoner’s constitutionally 

protected liberty.

Marion v. Radtke, 641 F.3d 874, 876 (7th Cir. 2011), points 

out that that “the right comparison is between the ordinary 

conditions of a high-security prison in the state, and the 

conditions under which a prisoner is actually held.” That 

doesn’t say a great deal, however, because the critical question is how far the treatment of the complaining inmate deviates from those ordinary conditions. And what if the inmate is an elderly person convicted of a nonviolent crime 

such as bank fraud and serving his prison term in a minimum-security prison; wouldn’t it be “atypical” and “significant” for him to be sent to a high-security prison for a trivial 

disciplinary infraction?

Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. 215 (1976), contains language 

to the effect that moving a prisoner from a lower-security to 

a higher-security prison does not deprive him of liberty protected by the due process clause. But that was a case in 

which prisoners were transferred because they were suspected of having committed arson in the lower-security 

prison. They had to be transferred, to protect the inmates and 

staff of the lower-security prison. It would be a mistake to

extrapolate from those facts a rule that allowed a prisoner to 

seek relief for being placed in solitary confinement in his 

prison but never for being transferred from a prison in 

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which he hadn’t been in solitary confinement to one in 

which all prisoners are in solitary (or the common 23-hour 

approximation thereto), as at ADX, the federal “Supermax” 

prison in Florence, Colorado.

The judge made two errors in finding that Kervin could 

not establish a violation of the Sandin standard, though they 

were not consequential. The first was to evaluate separately 

the gravity of each punishment meted out to him, thereby

failing to assess the aggregate punishments inflicted. We

said in Marion v. Columbia Correctional Institution, 559 F.3d 

693, 699 (7th Cir. 2009), that “we must take into consideration all of the circumstances of a prisoner’s confinement in

order to ascertain whether” he has been deprived of liberty 

within the meaning of the due process clause. The judge’s 

second error was to suggest, echoing the Beverati decision,

that a prisoner must spend at least six months in segregation 

before he can complain about having been deprived of liberty without due process of law. A considerably shorter period 

of segregation may, depending on the conditions of confinement and on any additional punishments, establish a violation, as held in such cases as Palmer v. Richards, 364 F.3d 

60, 65–67 (2d Cir. 2004) (77 days); Mitchell v. Horn, 318 F.3d 

523, 527, 532–33 (3d Cir. 2003) (90 days); and Gaines v. 

Stenseng, 292 F.3d 1222, 1225–26 (10th Cir. 2002) (75 days).

Six months is not an apt presumptive minimum for establishing a violation. Judges who lean toward such a presumption may be unfamiliar with the nature of modern 

prison segregation and the psychological damage that it can 

inflict. Segregation isn’t just separating a prisoner from one 

or several other prisoners. As noted by the Supreme Court in 

the Wilkinson case, “almost all human contact is prohibited, 

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even to the point that conversation is not permitted from cell 

to cell; the light, though it may be dimmed, is on for 24 

hours; exercise is for 1 hour per day, but only in a small indoor room.” 545 U.S. at 223–24. The serious psychological 

consequences of such quasi-solitary imprisonment have 

been documented. See, e.g., Elizabeth Bennion, “Banning the 

Bing: Why Extreme Solitary Confinement is Cruel and Far 

Too Usual Punishment,” 90 Indiana Law Journal 741 (2015); 

Stuart Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement,” 22 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 325 

(2006); Craig Haney & Mona Lynch, “Regulating Prisons of 

the Future: A Psychological Analysis of Supermax and Solitary Confinement,” 23 N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change

477 (1997).

Kervin, however, was placed in segregation for at most 

30 days and, more importantly, does not allege that he suffered any significant psychological or other injury from it. So 

the judge was right to dismiss his suit. But we take this opportunity to remind both prison officials and judges to be 

alert for the potentially serious adverse consequences of protracted segregation as punishment for misbehavior in prison, 

especially the kind of nonviolent misbehavior involved in 

the present case.

AFFIRMED.

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