Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-15-01844/USCOURTS-ca7-15-01844-0/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. 15-1844

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

BEN LOUDEN, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Southern District of Illinois.

No. 12-cv-01171-MJR-SCW — Michael J. Reagan, Chief Judge.

____________________

SUBMITTED AUGUST 18, 2016 — DECIDED AUGUST 22, 2016

____________________

Before POSNER, EASTERBROOK, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. Michael Armstrong contends 

in this suit under 42 U.S.C. §1983 that police officers in 

Belleville, Illinois, needlessly used a Taser against him when 

he was disoriented after being hit by a bus. We assume for 

the purpose of this appeal that Armstrong was knocked unconscious by the bus and unable to respond to commands 

issued by the police in the minutes after he regained consciousness. The defendants moved for summary judgment, 

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contending that use of the Taser was reasonable under the 

circumstances as they appeared to the police, who did not 

have all the facts. Armstrong did not reply to the motion for 

summary judgment. The district court accepted defendants’ 

version of events and on May 1, 2014, entered judgment in 

their favor.

Armstrong did not file a notice of appeal within the 30 

days allowed by 28 U.S.C. §2107(a) or request an extension 

under §2107(c). See also Fed. R. App. P. 4(a)(1)(A). In September 2014 he asked the clerk of court for a docket sheet, 

which showed that the case had been closed in May. On 

January 12, 2015, Armstrong filed a motion asking the court 

to reopen the case on the ground that he had not received 

defendants’ motion for summary judgment or the order 

granting it. The motion was captioned as one under Fed. R. 

Civ. P. 59(e), but the district judge deemed it to be under 

Rule 60(b), because it had been filed well after the 28 days 

that Rule 59 allows. The district judge denied this motion on 

January 27, 2015, because he thought Armstrong himself responsible for the lack of notice.

Armstrong notified the clerk of court that his address 

had changed, but the notice did not contain the caption or 

docket number of either of the two suits he had pending. 

The clerk searched the docket and found one case, changing 

the address in that one, but did not locate the other. The district court wrote that Armstrong should have informed the 

clerk of all docket numbers affected by the address change.

Perhaps the clerk assumed that Armstrong had only one 

case pending and stopped the search after finding it. That’s a 

reasonable assumption; most litigants have only one suit 

pending at a time. A litigant is in the best position to alert 

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No. 15-1844 3

the court’s staff to all affected cases. Armstrong should count

himself lucky that the clerk managed to track down and fix 

the address information in even one of his suits.

Once again Armstrong did not appeal. Instead, on March 

9, 2015, he filed a second motion for relief from the judgment 

of May 2014. The district court denied this on March 13, observing that Armstrong had not provided any new reason, 

and that the decision of January 27 therefore should stand.

Thirty-eight days after the order of March 13, a notice of 

appeal appeared in the district court’s electronic filing system. The Southern District of Illinois permits law libraries of 

state prisons to use the electronic system, and this is how the 

notice of appeal was filed. We directed Armstrong to explain 

why this appeal should not be dismissed as untimely. He 

replied via a declaration, see 28 U.S.C. §1746, that he gave 

the notice to the law library’s staff on April 12, which would 

have allowed a timely filing, but that the prison’s employees 

tarried. We have no reason to doubt the veracity of that contention and therefore deem the appeal timely under the 

mailbox rule, which provides that the filing date of a notice 

is the date it is placed in the prison mail system. Fed. R. App. 

P. 4(c)(1). If a prison requires legal documents to be handed 

over to the law library, that counts as a legal-mail system 

and makes the appeal timely even if the prison’s staff is laggard. See Taylor v. Brown, 787 F.3d 851, 858–59 & n.10 (7th 

Cir. 2015).

This conclusion does not assist Armstrong, however, because he did not appeal at all until the district court had denied multiple post-judgment motions. Successive postjudgment motions do not allow an effective extension of the 

time to appeal from the denial of the initial motion, let alone 

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the original judgment. See, e.g., Browder v. Director, Department of Corrections, 434 U.S. 257, 263 n.7 (1978); York Group, 

Inc. v. Wuxi Taihu Tractor Co., 632 F.3d 399, 401 (7th Cir. 

2011). The only thing appealable was the district court’s order of March 13, 2015, and that order is unexceptionable, because Armstrong did not provide a good reason to upset the 

order of January 27. Litigants cannot string out the process, 

and defer the time for appeal, by filing successive motions.

Armstrong contends that the district court should not 

have treated his contest to the order of January 27 as a successive Rule 60 motion. Instead, he maintains, the court 

should have proceeded as if the motion had been filed in 

mid-February, and therefore as a Rule 59(e) request to 

change the Rule 60 decision. That would have permitted an 

appeal from the decision of January 27 under Fed. R. App. P. 

4(a)(4)(A)(iv), which says that Rule 59 motions suspend the 

time to appeal. But the earliest plausible filing date under 

the prison-mailbox rule was more than 28 days after the decision of January 27, so this motion was indeed successive, 

rather than a timely request to reconsider the initial postjudgment decision.

And there is a further problem. Although the district 

judge and the litigants have discussed Armstrong’s initial

post-judgment motion as if it were one under Rule 60(b), 

that is not the right rule. Appellate Rule 4(a)(6) governs what 

happens when a litigant does not receive timely notice of a 

judgment’s entry. Rule 4(a)(6)(B) permits a district court to 

reopen the time to appeal, but only if the motion is filed 

within 180 days of the judgment, or 14 days of actual notice, 

whichever is earlier. Armstrong learned of the judgment 

within 180 days of its entry, but he waited some three 

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No. 15-1844 5

months to ask the district court for relief (and that request 

arrived about eight months after the judgment’s entry). So 

his request was late under both parts of Rule 4(a)(6)(B), and 

the district court lacked authority to reopen the time for appeal. Treating Armstrong’s January 2015 motion as under 

Rule 4(a)(6)(B) would mean that the March 2015 submission

was the first genuine Rule 60(b) motion, but that would not 

matter. Armstrong missed deadlines that a court is forbidden to extend, see Fed. R. App. P. 26(b)(1); Fed. R. Civ. P. 

6(b)(2), so the characterization of the papers that Armstrong 

filed in March 2015 is irrelevant.

Whether we look at this case through the lens of Appellate Rule 4(a)(6) or Civil Rule 60(b), Armstrong has taken too 

long after learning about defendants’ motion for summary 

judgment and the resulting judgment. He is not entitled to a 

further opportunity to litigate.

AFFIRMED

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