United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit 

Chicago, Illinois 60604 

Submitted December 7, 2018*

Decided December 20, 2018 

Before 

MICHAEL S. KANNE, Circuit Judge 

AMY C. BARRETT, Circuit Judge 

MICHAEL B. BRENNAN, Circuit Judge

No. 17-3299 

BENNY L. WILLIS, 

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

v. 

KENNETH ROSS, et al., 

 Defendants-Appellees.

 Appeal from the United States District 

Court for the Northern District of 

Illinois, Eastern Division. 

No. 12 C 1939 

Joan H. Lefkow, 

Judge. 

O R D E R 

While Benny Willis was in jail awaiting trial on a charge of armed robbery, a 

warrant to arrest him for violating his parole was also pending. He received his 

parole-revocation hearing after he was convicted of armed robbery, about two years 

after the parole-violation warrant was issued. Willis has sued correctional officials over 

 

*

 Willis has moved the court for oral argument, but we deny the motion and 

decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and record adequately present 

the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not significantly aid the court. 

FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C). 

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION 

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 
No. 17-3299 Page 2 

this delay, and the district court dismissed the suit for failure to state a claim. The judge 

correctly ruled that due process did not require a parole-revocation hearing while Willis 

was validly detained on the charge for armed robbery. See Doyle v. Elsea, 658 F.2d 512, 

516 (7th Cir. 1981). Therefore, we affirm. 

Six months after Willis began parole from state prison for drug crimes, he was 

arrested and detained in jail on a criminal warrant for armed robbery. The Illinois 

Department of Corrections also issued a warrant to arrest Willis for violating his parole, 

but the warrant was not executed. Willis alleges that, because that warrant remained 

pending, he was not released from jail while he awaited trial for armed robbery. 

Willis spent 29 months in pretrial detention, followed by two sentencings. The 

first sentencing occurred after he pleaded guilty to armed robbery. He received a 

72-month sentence, which allowed for 36 months of parole. The state court credited 

Willis with the 29 months that he spent in jail awaiting trial, leaving only 7 more 

months to serve before he began parole in August 2010. The next sentencing occurred 

soon after the first, when Willis went before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board for his 

parole-revocation hearing. The Board revoked his parole and sentenced him to 15 

months in prison. It did not credit any of the 29 months that he served before his 

armed-robbery conviction, so the 15-month term postponed his release to April 2011, 

about 8 months after his estimated release on parole from the armed-robbery sentence. 

After his release, Willis brought this suit for damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. 

With the aid of recruited counsel, Willis alleged that officials from the Department of 

Corrections denied him due process and violated state law by not holding a parolerevocation hearing promptly after his arrest for armed robbery. In his view, had he 

received a prompt hearing, one of two favorable outcomes would have occurred: either 

his parole would not have been revoked and he would have been released on bond for 

the charge of armed robbery, or, if his parole had been revoked, he would have served 

his 15-month revocation sentence during his 29 months of pretrial detention and 

thereby been released 8 months sooner. Willis also alleged that Michelle Littlejohn, an 

employee of the Parole Revocation Board, negligently computed his ultimate release 

date. The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim. (The 

defendants did not argue that, under Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), Willis may 

not proceed under Section 1983 because he did not first petition to invalidate his 

allegedly wrongful detention by seeking a writ of habeas corpus, so we do not consider 

that issue.) 
No. 17-3299 Page 3 

The district court dismissed the suit. First, the judge ruled that Willis failed to 

state a due-process claim. She reasoned that his guilty plea supplied probable cause for 

his 29-month detention; thus, under Doyle v. Elsea he had no right to an earlier parolerevocation hearing. The judge also ruled that she “lacks supplemental jurisdiction” over 

Willis’s related state-law claim. She then dismissed both claims with prejudice and gave 

Willis leave to amend his complaint to allege an Eighth Amendment claim against 

Littlejohn. Willis amended his complaint pro se and moved for relief under Federal 

Rule of Civil Procedure 59, arguing that the judge had incorrectly assumed that the 

Department of Corrections learned about his armed-robbery warrant after his arrest. 

The judge denied that motion because the assumption was irrelevant: regardless of the 

timeline, the armed-robbery warrant rendered the arrest and pretrial detention lawful. 

Finally, the judge dismissed the proposed Eighth Amendment claim against Littlejohn 

because Willis had not alleged that Littlejohn wrongly calculated his release date with 

deliberate indifference. 

On appeal, Willis first challenges the dismissal of his claim that due process 

required corrections officers to give him to an earlier hearing on his parole-revocation 

charge. We review de novo the judge’s dismissal for failure to state a claim. Alexander 

v. McKinney, 692 F.3d 553, 555 (7th Cir. 2012). To comply with due-process rights, parole 

officials may not revoke parole without first providing a hearing to determine if a 

violation has occurred. Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 482 (1972). Willis’s parole was 

revoked after a hearing, so the officials respected this due-process right. 

Willis replies that due process entitled him to receive this hearing two years 

earlier—shortly after his arrest for armed robbery—because that is when he was 

charged with violating parole. But we rejected this theory in Doyle v. Elsea, 658 F.2d at 

516. Doyle was a parolee who, like Willis, was arrested for a new crime and, based on 

that new crime, was also charged with violating his parole. Also like Willis, Doyle 

remained validly in custody until he was convicted for that new crime, at which point 

he received a parole-revocation hearing. Id. at 513–14. We ruled that Doyle’s delayed 

hearing did not violate due process because he was validly incarcerated for the new 

crime during the time that his parole-violation charge was pending. Id. at 515–16. Willis, 

too, was validly in jail for armed robbery while he awaited his parole-revocation 

hearing because his criminal warrant for armed robbery justified his pretrial detention. 

See Baker v. McCollan, 443 U.S. 137, 143–44 (1979). Therefore, under Doyle, due process 

did not require that Willis receive an earlier parole-revocation hearing. 
No. 17-3299 Page 4 

Willis next challenges the district judge’s decision to dismiss his claim that the 

delay of his parole-revocation hearing violated state law, but this challenge also fails. 

Generally, when all federal claims are dismissed before trial, the district court should 

relinquish supplemental jurisdiction over state-law claims, unless (1) the statute of 

limitations has run; (2) the claim has already consumed substantial judicial resources; or 

(3) the resolution of the claim is obvious. Davis v. Cook Cty., 534 F.3d 650, 654 (7th Cir. 

2008). Here, the resolution of this state-law claim was not clear (the court did not even 

analyze it), and he arguably had at least a year from the district court’s dismissal to sue 

in state court, see 735 IL. COMP. STAT. 5/13–217; Davis, 534 F.3d at 654. We are mindful 

that the judge wrote that she “lacks” jurisdiction over this state-law claim and then 

dismissed it with prejudice. We read this as the judge properly exercising her discretion 

to relinquish supplemental jurisdiction. Thus, the dismissal of this state-law claim 

should have been without prejudice, and we modify the judgment on this claim 

accordingly. 

Willis next argues, incorrectly, that the district court wrongly dismissed his claim 

against Littlejohn for miscalculating his release date. To state a claim under the Eighth 

Amendment against an official who allegedly incarcerated an inmate beyond the proper 

release date, a plaintiff must allege that the official knew or recklessly disregarded the 

correct release date. See Werner v. Wall, 836 F.3d 751, 760 (7th Cir. 2016), cert. denied, 137 

S. Ct. 2213 (2017); Figgs v. Dawson, 829 F.3d 895, 902–03 (7th Cir. 2016). But Willis never 

alleged this state of mind, even after he amended his complaint and even though the 

Federal Rules permit plaintiffs to allege states of mind generally. See FED. R. CIV. P. 9(b). 

Willis also contends that the district judge improperly construed his Rule 59 

motion as a motion for “reconsideration.” But he does not articulate any prejudice that 

occurred from this relabeling of his motion, and we review rulings on both types of 

motions for abuse of discretion, see Gonzalez-Koeneke v. West, 791 F.3d 801, 807 (7th Cir. 

2015); Obriecht v. Raemisch, 517 F.3d 489, 492 (7th Cir. 2008). The judge did not abuse her 

discretion in denying the motion; she correctly concluded that, regardless of when the 

Department of Corrections learned about Willis’s armed-robbery warrant, the existence 

of that warrant meant that Willis was validly arrested and detained. See Cook v. O’Neill, 

803 F.3d 296, 300-01 (7th Cir. 2015). 

Finally, Willis argues that the district judge abused her discretion when she 

recruited counsel who was not an expert in criminal procedure. But plaintiffs do not 

have a right to recruited counsel in federal civil litigation, see Olson v. Morgan, 750 F.3d 

708, 711 (7th Cir. 2014), and it follows that without a right to recruited counsel, there can 
No. 17-3299 Page 5 

be no right to counsel with a certain substantive expertise. What is more, recruited 

counsel is an agent of the client, not of the court, see Fuery v. City of Chicago, 900 F.3d 

450, 467 (7th Cir. 2018); Lombardo v. United States, 860 F.3d 547, 552 (7th Cir. 2017) 

(collecting cases), and the judge is not responsible for monitoring how expertly counsel 

handles the case. Therefore, the judge did not abuse her discretion in recruiting Willis’s 

counsel. 

AFFIRMED AS MODIFIED.