Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca6-08-01774/USCOURTS-ca6-08-01774-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Bureau of Health Care Michigan Department of Corrections
Appellee
Correctional Medical Services, Incorporated
Appellee
Carolynn DuBuc
Appellee
Ruth Ingram
Appellee
Andrew Jackson
Appellee
Michigan Department of Corrections
Appellee
Justina Nzums
Appellee
George Pramstaller
Appellee
Mark Anthony Reed-Bey
Appellant
Richard D. Russell
Appellee
S. Vadlamudi
Appellee

Document Text:

RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION

Pursuant to Sixth Circuit Rule 206

File Name: 10a0119p.06

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT _________________

MARK ANTHONY REED-BEY,

Plaintiff - Appellant,

v.

GEORGE PRAMSTALLER, RICHARD D.

RUSSELL, BUREAU OF HEALTH CARE

MICHIGAN DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS,

CORRECTIONAL MEDICAL SERVICES,

INCORPORATED, MICHIGAN DEPARTMENT OF

CORRECTIONS, S. VADLAMUDI, CAROLYNN

DUBUC, ANDREW JACKSON, JUSTINA NZUMS

and RUTH INGRAM,

Defendants-Appellees.

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No. 08-1774

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit.

No. 06-10934—Victoria A. Roberts, District Judge.

Submitted: April 22, 2010

Decided and Filed: April 28, 2010 

Before: GUY, BOGGS and SUTTON, Circuit Judges.

_________________

COUNSEL

ON BRIEF: Clifton B. Schneider, OFFICE OF THE MICHIGAN ATTORNEY

GENERAL, Lansing, Michigan, James T. Mellon, MELLON, McCARTHY & PRIES, P.C.,

Troy, Michigan, for Appellees. Mark Anthony Reed-Bey, Ionia, Michigan, pro se.

_________________

OPINION

_________________

SUTTON, Circuit Judge. Mark Anthony Reed-Bey, a Michigan inmate, appeals a

district court’s judgment dismissing his § 1983 lawsuit against Michigan prison officials on

the ground that he did not exhaust his claim. See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). Reed-Bey pursued

1

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his grievance through all three levels of prison review, yet he failed to identify the “names

of all those involved” in the grievance, as the prison’s grievance procedures require. R.42-6

¶ T. Because the Michigan Department of Corrections opted to dismiss his grievance on the

merits rather than invoke its procedural bar, Reed-Bey exhausted his claim. We reverse and

remand.

I.

On September 12, 2005, Reed-Bey injured his shoulder during a prison basketball

game, sufficiently badly that one of the bones was visibly out of place. That evening, an

emergency-room physician diagnosed Reed-Bey with a Grade III acromioclavicular

separation and ligament damage. The emergency-room physician discharged Reed-Bey later

that night and recommended that he see an orthopedic specialist within five days.

Prison officials did not send Reed-Bey to an orthopedic specialist until December 1,

even though he requested follow-up care at least four times in the interim and even though

an October 25 X-ray showed that the shoulder separation had worsened. On December 1,

the specialist told Reed-Bey that his shoulder required surgery and that the shoulder pain and

accompanying headaches—some lasting up to three days—would persist until doctors fixed

his shoulder. Prison officials did not approve his shoulder surgery until some time after

March 2006.

On October 10, 2005, Reed-Bey filed a prison grievance complaining about the lack

of follow-up care for the injury. When the prison failed to respond within 15 business days,

as required by prison policy, he filed a Step II grievance appeal on November 3. On

November 18, Nurses Nzums and Ingram rejected Reed-Bey’s initial grievance, noting that

prison officials had requested an orthopedic consultation but were awaiting approval from

Correctional Medical Services, a private health-management company hired by the State of

Michigan to provide medical services for the Department of Corrections. When prison

officials failed to respond to his Step II appeal by the required deadline, Reed-Bey filed a

Step III appeal with the Director of Prisons on December 6. On December 28, Carolynn

DuBuc, a health unit manager, belatedly denied Reed-Bey’s Step II appeal because his care

complied with “contemporary standards of medical practice in the community” and because

the prison health staff had given him adequate pain medication. R.1 Ex. D at 2. On

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March 20, two months after the deadline for resolving Reed-Bey’s Step III appeal had

passed, the Director of Prisons denied Reed-Bey’s Step III appeal on the merits. 

On March 1, 2006, Reed-Bey sued the Michigan Department of Corrections and

Correctional Medical Services, along with several employees of both entities, alleging that

they violated his Eighth (and Fourteenth) Amendment rights by denying him adequate

medical care. Roughly a month later, the district court summarily dismissed the lawsuit

because Reed-Bey did not properly exhaust his administrative remedies by naming all of the

defendants in his initial grievance, as required under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of

1995 (PLRA), Pub. L. No. 104-134, 110 Stat. 1321-66—or so we (and the district court)

thought at the time. See Burton v. Jones, 321 F.3d 569, 575 (6th Cir. 2003). Roughly a year

later, the Supreme Court overruled Burton’s interpretation of the PLRA, Jones v. Bock, 549

U.S. 199 (2007), and accordingly we vacated the district court’s decision in Reed-Bey and

remanded the case for further consideration.

On remand, CMS filed a motion to dismiss, again claiming that the PLRA barred

Reed-Bey’s lawsuit because he did not name CMS in his initial grievance. Because the

“name all defendants” rule was part of the Department of Corrections’ internal grievance

policies, CMS argued, the PLRA barred Reed-Bey’s suit, notwithstanding Jones v. Bock.

The Department of Corrections, Pramstaller, Russell and Vadlamudi moved for summary

judgment under the same theory. The district court granted both motions, and on its own

initiative it also dismissed Reed-Bey’s claims against DuBuc, Jackson, Nzums and Ingram.

II.

A.

Reed-Bey’s appeal presents one question: Did he properly exhaust his administrative

remedies despite failing to name a single individual in his initial grievance? If not, the

PLRA bars his claim. See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a); Woodford v. Ngo, 548 U.S. 81, 93 (2006).

An inmate exhausts a claim by taking advantage of each step the prison holds out for

resolving the claim internally and by following the “critical procedural rules” of the prison’s

grievance process to permit prison officials to review and, if necessary, correct the grievance

“on the merits” in the first instance. Woodford, 548 U.S. at 90, 95 (internal quotation marks

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omitted). Under the Department of Corrections’ procedural rules, inmates must include the

“[d]ates, times, places and names of all those involved in the issue being grieved” in their

initial grievance. R.42-6 ¶ T. These rules suggest a straightforward answer to the question

presented—“No”—because Reed-Bey did not identify the “names of all those involved in

the issue being grieved.”

But this case comes with a twist. Officials at the Department of Corrections, for

reasons of their own, overlooked (or perhaps forgave) this procedural failing and chose to

address Reed-Bey’s grievance on the merits. That makes a difference. The point of the

PLRA exhaustion requirement is to allow prison officials “a fair opportunity” to address

grievances on the merits, to correct prison errors that can and should be corrected and to

create an administrative record for those disputes that eventually end up in court. Woodford,

548 U.S. at 94–95; see Porter v. Nussle, 534 U.S. 516, 525 (2002). Requiring inmates to

exhaust prison remedies in the manner the State provides—by, say, identifying all relevant

defendants—not only furthers these objectives, but it also prevents inmates from

undermining these goals by intentionally defaulting their claims at each step of the grievance

process, prompting unnecessary and wasteful federal litigation in the process. See

Woodford, 548 U.S. at 94–96.

Yet the equation changes when the State does not enforce its own rules. When

prison officials decline to enforce their own procedural requirements and opt to consider

otherwise-defaulted claims on the merits, so as a general rule will we. See Vandiver v.

Correctional Med. Servs., Inc., 326 F. App’x 885, 891 (6th Cir. 2009). In that setting, the

State, as the promulgator of the rules, has had a chance to provide a remedy for the inmate

and to decide whether the objectives of the review process have been served. When the State

nonetheless decides to reject the claim on the merits, who are we to second guess its decision

to overlook or forgive its own procedural bar? The rules serve the State’s interests: its

interest in creating a prison grievance system, its interest in reviewing a complaint before

another sovereign gets involved and its interest in deciding when to waive or enforce its own

rules. And the State’s decision to review a claim on the merits gives us a warrant to do so

as well, even when a procedural default might otherwise have resolved the claim. 

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At least three circuits have come to the same conclusion. See Riccardo v. Rausch,

375 F.3d 521, 524 (7th Cir. 2004) (overlooking the untimeliness of a grievance, over the

objection of the defendants, where prison officials reviewed grievance on the merits); Ross

v. County of Bernalillo, 365 F.3d 1181, 1186 (10th Cir. 2004) (same), abrogated on other

grounds by Jones, 549 U.S. 199; Camp v. Brennan, 219 F.3d 279, 281 (3d Cir. 2000)

(overlooking failure to file grievance with the proper officials, over the objection of the

defendants, where officials ultimately reviewed grievance on the merits). No circuit to our

knowledge has come to a different conclusion.

This approach also parallels the rules for “the similar statutory scheme governing

habeas corpus,” Jones, 549 U.S. at 212. See Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 731–32

(1991); Pozo v. McCaughtry, 286 F.3d 1022, 1025 (7th Cir. 2002) (drawing the same

analogy). In habeas, “a procedural default does not bar consideration of a federal claim . . .

unless the last state court rendering a judgment in the case clearly and expressly states that

its judgment rests on a state procedural bar,” or it is otherwise clear they did not evaluate the

claim on the merits. Harris v. Reed, 489 U.S. 255, 263 (1989) (internal quotation marks

omitted); see Coleman, 501 U.S. at 735–36. Exhaustion and procedural default principles

in federal habeas, as in the PLRA, serve many of the same goals: to conserve scarce judicial

resources, to avoid needless federal judicial decisions and above all to give state officials

a realistic opportunity to correct their own mistakes before federal courts intervene. See

Massaro v. United States, 538 U.S. 500, 504 (2003); Coleman, 501 U.S. at 731–32. It makes

considerable sense to adopt similar approaches in addressing similar concerns under the two

regimes. Cf. Harris, 489 U.S. at 263.

The Department of Corrections argues that this approach overlooks the key insight

of the Supreme Court’s decision in Woodford: If courts do not penalize inmates for ignoring

grievance policies, they will reward inmates for failing to give prison officials “a fair

opportunity to correct their own errors.” 548 U.S. at 94–95. But our decision by no means

encourages inmates intentionally to default their grievances. See id. at 95–96. We still will

honor procedural rules that prison officials themselves enforce, and that reality should give

inmates all the incentive they need to seek—and obtain—merits review of their grievances.

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Enforcing internal prison rules even when prison officials do not and even when they

proceed to address a grievance on the merits takes Woodford one step too far. It would do

more than ensure that prison officials get the first shot at correcting their own mistakes; it

would give their merits-based grievance denials undeserved insulation from federal judicial

review. Under this approach, we could never review, for example, whether the Department

of Corrections properly concluded that Reed-Bey’s allegations of unconstitutional treatment

lack merit. The Department would dismiss any subsequent grievance related to his 2005

medical care as untimely, because he has only seven business days after an incident to file

a grievance. We then would dismiss any future § 1983 suits related to his 2005 medical

treatment due to improper exhaustion. See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a).

What interest such an approach would advance is hard to see. It would do nothing

to further any of the goals of proper exhaustion under the PLRA. It would not incentivize

good-faith efforts at exhaustion. See Woodford, 548 U.S. at 90. It would not avoid

otherwise needless interference with prison administration. See id. at 93. It would not

promote efficiency. See id. at 89. And it would not produce an otherwise unavailable record

for future judicial proceedings, as future judicial proceedings would be foreclosed and the

relevant record already exists. See Nussle, 534 U.S. at 525. We see no benefit to enforcing

a procedural bar that the Department of Corrections did not. We instead conclude that ReedBey properly exhausted his claim because he invoked one complete round of the

Department’s grievance procedures and received merits-based responses at each step.

B.

When CMS was the only defendant in the case to file a response merits brief, ReedBey asked that we bar the other defendants from filing response briefs and tax his appellate

costs against all the defendants. We deny Reed-Bey’s motion to strike any untimely briefs,

but he may collect the costs of his appeal in accordance with Appellate Rule 39.

III.

For these reasons, we reverse the district court’s summary judgment order in favor

of the Department of Corrections, the Bureau of Health Care, Pramstaller, Russell and

Vadlamudi; its Rule 12(h)(3) dismissal of DuBuc, Jackson, Nzums and Ingram; and its Rule

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12(b)(6) dismissal of CMS. The district court should consider CMS’s alternative theory that

Reed-Bey failed to plead a viable § 1983 claim on remand.

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