United States Court of Appeals

For the Eighth Circuit 

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No. 20-1995

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Stansel Alexander Prowse, now known as Ka’Torah Arya Sage Prowse

 Plaintiff - Appellant

v.

Walter Washington, Lieutenant, VSM, ADC; Ned Buttler, Sergeant, VSM, ADC

 Defendants - Appellees

Brian Perkins, Sergeant, VSM, ADC; John Does, 1-3, Correctional Officer, VSM, 

ADC

Defendants 

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Appeal from United States District Court 

for the Eastern District of Arkansas - Pine Bluff

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Submitted: June 15, 2021

Filed: August 18, 2021

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Before GRUENDER, ARNOLD, and STRAS, Circuit Judges. 

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STRAS, Circuit Judge.

Paperwork sometimes gets misplaced, or so says Ka’Torah Prowse. Although

prison officials claim that Prowse initially failed to submit a complete administrative 
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appeal, she maintains that she did and has a dated document to prove it. This is a 

classic dispute for a factfinder to resolve, which is why we reverse the grant of 

summary judgment and remand for further proceedings. 

I. 

Prowse, an Arkansas inmate, claims that Lieutenant Walter Washington and 

Sergeant Ned Buttler assaulted her to the point of unconsciousness. She filed an 

internal complaint, but her attempts at both informal and formal resolution were 

unsuccessful. 

Having reached an impasse, Prowse decided to file an administrative appeal. 

She first submitted a complete package of documents dated August 16, 2019, which 

prison officials claim they did not receive or review until August 28. She also

submitted one of the attachments a second time, allegedly on August 22, but prison 

officials reviewed it first, on August 27. The lone attachment was rejected as 

incomplete and the complete package as “duplicat[ive].” Prowse’s position is that 

prison officials reviewed the documents out of sequence. 

After Prowse filed a lawsuit against Lieutenant Washington and Sergeant 

Buttler, among others, see U.S. Const. amend. VIII; 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the focus 

soon turned to whether she had exhausted her administrative remedies. The district 

court said no and, adopting a magistrate judge’s report and recommendation, granted 

summary judgment to the defendants. See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a).

II. 

We review the district court’s decision to grant summary judgment de novo. 

Tonelli v. United States, 60 F.3d 492, 494 (8th Cir. 1995). “Summary judgment 

[was] appropriate [if] the evidence, viewed in [the] light most favorable to [Prowse], 

shows no genuine issue of material fact exists and [the officials were] entitled to 
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judgment as a matter of law.” Phillips v. Mathews, 547 F.3d 905, 909 (8th Cir. 2008) 

(quotation marks omitted).

Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a prisoner who wishes to challenge 

the conditions of confinement must typically exhaust all administrative remedies “in 

accordance with the [prison’s] applicable procedural rules” before bringing a 

lawsuit. Woodford v. Ngo, 548 U.S. 81, 88, 93 (2006); see also 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). 

As relevant here, the rules at Prowse’s prison required administrative appeals to have

two attachments: a description of the issue and personnel involved (Attachment I) 

and the warden’s response to the grievance (Attachment III). The dispute here is 

over whether Prowse included Attachment III in the paperwork she first turned over

to prison officials.

According to Prowse, she did. When prison officials failed to acknowledge 

receipt of her appeal within five days, she sought a status update1 by resubmitting a 

copy of Attachment I with the following note: “[n]o response, I still have fear for 

my safety.” After that point, due to what was likely a paperwork mix-up, she 

believes that prison officials reviewed what she submitted in reverse chronological 

order. So from her point of view, she exhausted her administrative remedies exactly 

as the prison rules required, with any breakdown on the prison’s part.2

The defendants view the evidence differently. What must have happened,

they surmise, is that Prowse originally submitted an incomplete appeal that omitted

1

Prowse did not, despite what the defendants argue, forfeit this explanation by 

offering a different one to the district court. See Weitz Co. v. Lloyd’s of London, 574 

F.3d 885, 891 (8th Cir. 2009) (explaining that a “shift in approach” on appeal is not 

the same thing as raising “a new issue”).

2

Though, as Prowse points out, she filed other grievances too, they focus on 

“decidedly different issue[s],” like the falsification of documents, preservation of 

evidence, and retaliation. Muhammad v. Mayfield, 933 F.3d 993, 1003 (8th Cir. 

2019). For that reason, none of them could have administratively exhausted her 

excessive-force claim.
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Attachment III. Then, realizing her mistake, she handed over a second set of papers 

and backdated them to make it look like they were submitted first. Under this 

scenario, the prison was justified in denying both appeals for exactly the reasons it 

gave. And for Prowse, it would mean that her administrative remedies remain 

unexhausted, spelling the end of her federal lawsuit. See Woodford, 548 U.S. at 88, 

93.

Whether Prowse’s lawsuit continues, in other words, comes down to which 

set of papers she filed first, which is a classic dispute of material fact. See Anderson 

v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242, 248 (1986) (explaining that summary judgment 

is not appropriate “if the evidence is such that a reasonable [factfinder] could return 

a verdict for the nonmoving party”). What is needed now is a factfinder to resolve 

it. 

In reaching this conclusion, we necessarily reject the argument that the order 

in which the prison stamped the papers is somehow dispositive. See Scott v. Harris, 

550 U.S. 372, 380 (2007) (explaining that there is no genuine dispute when one 

side’s account “is blatantly contradicted by the record”). For one thing, nothing rules 

out the possibility that prison officials initially misplaced Prowse’s paperwork and 

then stamped it later. For another, what matters under the prison’s rules is the order 

of submission, not receipt. So even assuming that prison officials received the 

paperwork in the same order they reviewed it, a “reasonable [factfinder] could [still]

believe” that she fully exhausted her administrative remedies by submitting the one 

dated August 16 first. Id.

III. 

We accordingly reverse the judgment of the district court, remand for further 

proceedings, and deny the pending motion for remand as moot. 

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