In the 

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 15-3892 

JAMES OWENS, 

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

v.

SALVADOR A. GODINEZ, et al., 

Defendants-Appellees. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the 

Southern District of Illinois. 

No. 13-530-SCW — Stephen C. Williams, Magistrate Judge. 

____________________ 

SUBMITTED MAY 12, 2017* — DECIDED JUNE 12, 2017 

RE-ISSUED AS OPINION JUNE 20, 2017 

____________________ 

Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and FLAUM and MANION, Circuit 

Judges. 

 * We have agreed to decide this 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. See FED. R. APP.

P. 34(a)(2)(C). 
2 No. 15-3892 

PER CURIAM. James Owens, an Illinois state prisoner, 

brought this suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 because he believes 

that nearly two dozen prison employees deliberately ignored 

his medical needs and retaliated against him for filing grievances and lawsuits. He is primarily dissatisfied with the adequacy of the toothpaste, mail supplies, and laundry detergent 

he received at three different prisons over a six-year period. 

The district court narrowed the list of defendants at screening, see 28 U.S.C. § 1915A, and later granted summary judgment for the remaining defendants. We affirm. 

This lawsuit is not the first one in which Owens has tossed 

into a single complaint a mishmash of unrelated allegations 

against unrelated defendants. In Owens v. Hinsley, 635 F.3d 

950, 952 (7th Cir. 2011), we warned that district courts should 

not allow inmates to flout the rules for joining claims and defendants, see FED. R. CIV. P. 18, 20, or to circumvent the Prison 

Litigation Reform Act’s fee requirements by combining multiple lawsuits into a single complaint. “Unrelated claims 

against different defendants belong in different suits,” George 

v. Smith, 507 F.3d 605, 607 (7th Cir. 2007), we said, apparently 

to no avail. Here, Owens has again pursued the same scattershot strategy. We urge the district courts to be alert to this 

problem.

When Owens, who is now 59 years old, entered the Illinois 

Department of Corrections in 2000, he already had lost two 

teeth to gum disease. He now wears partial dentures after losing eight more teeth. In this litigation, which he filed in 2013, 

he attributes his dental problems in part to the inadequacy of 

the dental supplies he received from May 2006 to May 2008 

while incarcerated at Illinois’s Hill Correctional Center, from 

May 2008 to June 2010 at Big Muddy Correctional Center, and 
No. 15-3892 3

from June to December 2010 at Pinckneyville Correctional 

Center. Owens asserts that the one or two travel-size tubes of 

toothpaste he received in his indigent kit each month at these 

three prisons were insufficient in light of his gum disease. 

And, Owens adds, since 2008 he has not had enough money 

in his greatly overdrawn commissary account to buy toothpaste. 

Owens also complains that he is too poor to purchase 

laundry detergent and correspondence supplies from the 

commissary. At Big Muddy, he explains, staff gave him only 

enough detergent to wash his clothes twice per month. 

And although he was allowed to purchase postage on credit 

at all three facilities, it could be used only for legal correspondence. Prison staff denied his grievances about the inadequate detergent and postage. Owens views those denials as 

retaliation for his earlier grievances and lawsuits. 

Owens is trying to hold a large number of defendants, including three former directors of the Department of Corrections, five members of its Administrative Review Board, the 

wardens of the three prisons, and several grievance officers 

and counselors, responsible for these slights. Screening the 

complaint, the district court concluded that Owens did not 

state a claim against several defendants because he had not 

alleged their personal involvement in any constitutional violations. Later the court concluded that any claims related to 

Owens’s incarceration at Hill and Big Muddy were barred by 

the two-year statute of limitations applicable to section 1983 

claims arising in Illinois. See 735 ILCS 5/13-202; Cesal v. Moats, 

851 F.3d 714, 721–22 (7th Cir. 2017). Those decisions left just 

two claims for damages that arose while Owens was in Pinck-
4 No. 15-3892 

neyville: (1) a deliberate indifference claim against the warden for denying him adequate dental supplies, and (2) a retaliation claim against the warden, a grievance officer, and two 

counselors for allegedly withholding correspondence supplies as punishment for filing grievances and lawsuits. The 

court also allowed Owens to pursue a claim against the director of the DOC (then Salvador Godinez) for any continuing 

violations of his constitutional rights. (The current Director of 

the Department is John Baldwin, who is the proper defendant 

for any official-capacity claim.) 

After the district court recruited counsel for Owens and 

the parties consented to proceed before a magistrate judge, 

see 28 U.S.C. § 636(c), the remaining defendants moved for 

summary judgment. In granting that motion, the court reasoned that Owens lacked evidence that the warden knew 

about Owens’s gum disease or his need for more toothpaste 

than the standard amount. Owens’s retaliation claims failed, 

the court said, because Owens admitted that the DOC does 

not provide postage to any inmate except for legal correspondence, and he had introduced no evidence showing that 

the defendants played a role in distributing indigent mailing 

supplies. Finally, the court concluded that Owens’s claim for 

injunctive relief became moot after his transfer to a new 

prison where he received what he regarded as an adequate 

amount of toothpaste. 

Owens now appeals, but we cannot address his arguments 

without first deciding whether, as the defendants contend, 

the appeal is untimely. The magistrate judge entered final 

judgment in this case on October 23, 2015. Twenty-eight days 

later Owens filed what he entitled a motion for extension of 

time. That document explained that an unspecified disability 
No. 15-3892 5

and a malfunctioning elevator at the prison had prevented 

him from going to the law library where his materials for this 

litigation were stored. Owens says that he had not been negligent in filing a “Rule 60 exception and/or a notice of appeal” 

and should receive an extension of time “to appeal the court’s 

ruling.” The magistrate judge found good cause for Owens’s 

delay and extended the appeal deadline until December 23, 

2015. See FED. R. APP. P. 4(a)(5). He missed that deadline, too, 

by four days: his notice of appeal is dated December 27. 

Still, we may construe his request for an extension of time 

as a notice of appeal, since that motion was filed within the 

original 30-day window for a notice of appeal and let the defendant know about his intent to appeal the judgment. 

See FED. R. APP. P. 3(c)(4) (“An appeal must not be dismissed 

for informality of form or title of the notice of appeal, or for 

failure to name a party whose intent to appeal is otherwise 

clear from the notice.”); Smith v. Barry, 502 U.S. 244, 248–49 

(1992) (“If a document filed within the time specified by Rule 

4 gives the notice required by Rule 3, it is effective as a notice 

of appeal.”); Listenbee v. City of Milwaukee, 976 F.2d 348, 350–

51 (7th Cir. 1992) (construing pro se motion for extension of 

time to appeal as a notice of appeal). We reject the defendants’ 

suggestion that the November 20 motion is ambiguous about 

Owens’s intent to appeal. Owens said there that he was not 

negligent in filing a notice of appeal or a postjudgment motion, and the relief he requested was an extension “of time to 

appeal the court’s ruling.” Our appellate jurisdiction is therefore secure. 

That brings us to the merits of the appeal. Owens does not 

challenge the magistrate judge’s conclusion that his request 

for injunctive relief is moot and that he failed to establish a 
6 No. 15-3892 

genuine issue of material fact concerning his claims of deliberate indifference and retaliation against the warden, counselors, and grievance officers at Pinckneyville. He thus has 

waived any appellate claim about those rulings. See FED. R.

APP. P. 28(a)(8); Rahn v. Bd. of Trustees of N. Ill. Univ., 803 F.3d 

285, 295 (7th Cir. 2015). Instead, Owens now asserts that the 

DOC is liable under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 

U.S. 658 (1978), for its alleged policies of providing inmates 

inadequate amounts of toothpaste, mail supplies, and laundry detergent. But the DOC, as a state agency, is not a “person” that can be sued under section 1983. See Will v. Mich. 

Dep't of State Police, 491 U.S. 58, 70–71 (1989); Fairley v. Fermaint, 482 F.3d 897, 904 (7th Cir. 2007). The district court thus 

correctly dismissed this part of the case. 

Next Owens faults the district court for dismissing his 

claims against the grievance officers and counselors he accused of ignoring his administrative complaints and appeals. 

We already have told him, however, that the mishandling of 

his “grievances by persons who otherwise did not cause or 

participate in the underlying conduct states no claim.” Owens, 

635 F.3d at 953–54. 

Finally, Owens argues that the two-year statute of 

limitations should not bar him from pursuing claims against 

the employees at Hill and Big Muddy. Although Owens has 

not been housed at either facility since June 2010 and did not 

file suit until June 2013, he insists that the limitations period 

was equitably tolled because, he says, prison staff impeded 

his access to the courts from 2009 through 2013. For equitable 

tolling to apply, Owens would need to show that his ability 

to file suit was frustrated in “some extraordinary way.” 

See Rosado v. Gonzalez, 832 F.3d 714, 717 (7th Cir. 2016) 
No. 15-3892 7

(applying Illinois law); Clay v. Kuhl, 727 N.E.2d 217, 223 

(Ill. 2000). He has not done so. As the district court noted in 

its order dismissing the defendants, Owens engaged in 

“nearly constant” litigation during 2009 and 2010. See Owens, 

supra; Owens v. Blagojevich, No. 06-CV-380-DRH (S.D. Ill. 

Aug. 5, 2009). Moreover, Owens’s own brief belies his 

contention that he faced especially daunting obstacles from 

December 2010 through June 2013, when he did not engage in 

any litigation. For example, he complains that he was allowed 

“only” five visits to the law library during the six months 

before he filed his complaint in this case. Yet he never explains 

why he needed to visit the law library at all to file a complaint. 

Owens seems to attribute his delay primarily to his not 

receiving all of his “excess legal boxes” until August 2013. But 

he does not say what the boxes contained, and their contents 

cannot have been essential to this litigation because Owens 

filed his complaint two months before he says he received the 

boxes. 

We have considered Owens’s remaining contentions, and 

none merits discussion. 

AFFIRMED.