Opinion ID: 2998723
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Did Dole exhaust?

Text: Dole argues that he has exhausted his administrative remedies. He argues that under Strong v. David, 297 F.3d 646, 650 (7th Cir. 2002), he cannot be expected to do more than the state’s regulations required of him. In that case, this court held that the district court erroneously ruled that the prisoner did not plead his case with enough particularity, when the state regulations did not dictate the degree of factual particularity necessary in a valid complaint. Id. The court stated that the prisoner’s grievances were comprehensible and “contained everything Illinois instructed him to include,” and therefore ruled that “Defendants can’t complain that he failed to do more.” Id. 10 No. 05-1868 The defendants argue that the rules provided Dole with the proper response when his complaint went missing. The regulations provide that “if an offender can demonstrate that a grievance was not timely filed for good cause, the grievance shall be considered.” ILL. ADMIN. CODE tit. 20, § 504.810(a). The Defendants cite McCoy v. Gilbert, 270 F.3d 503 (7th Cir. 2001), in support of their position. In that case, this court ruled that a prisoner did not exhaust his administrative remedies because he did not ask for discretionary untimeliness review under the federal prison grievance system. The court first rejected McCoy’s premise that his window of opportunity to file a grievance had permanently closed, noting that discretionary review was still available. “Our concern is not whether [prison authorities] would have accepted or rejected the post-PLRA grievance. Instead, we ‘merely need to ask whether the institution has an internal administrative grievance procedure by which prisoners can lodge complaints about prison conditions.’ ” Id. at 511 (quoting Massey v. Helman, 196 F.3d 727, 734 (7th Cir. 1999)). Because prison officials had the authority to take some sort of action with respect to a tardy complaint, the court agreed that McCoy must attempt to use the prison’s remaining administrative process. Id. Strong and McCoy tilt in opposite directions in this case, but we believe that Strong is more applicable here. See Strong, 297 F.3d at 650 (when a grievance meets all of the Administrative Code’s written requirements, it cannot be dismissed because of a requirement on which “the administrative rulebook is silent”). In McCoy, the plaintiff had not filed any grievance. The PLRA was passed after the deadline for a timely grievance had expired, but before McCoy had filed suit in federal court. The McCoy court based its holding in part on the fact that McCoy was “merely being held to the same requirements as any other prisoner who filed suit after the enactment of the PLRA.” Id. The court went on to state that had the prison refused No. 05-1868 11 to hear McCoy’s claim on untimeliness grounds, he would have been impermissibly procedurally “mousetrapped” by the PLRA, as his motivations for filing a grievance dramatically changed when that act became law. Id. at 512. The court noted that “we are of the opinion that McCoy has always had an opportunity to exhaust, but he simply chose not to,” id. at 508, and that his suit was “precisely the type of litigious behavior the PLRA was designed to prevent,” id. at 510. Dole, unlike McCoy, has already given the prison administrative process an opportunity to resolve his complaint. Unlike McCoy, who simply chose not to file a grievance at all, the misstep in Dole’s case was entirely that of the prison system. Dole could not maintain control of his complaint once the guard picked it up. He had no choice in the method used to transmit the complaint from the prison to the Board. He also had no means of being alerted that the ARB had not received his appeal in time to file a new, timely complaint; Illinois has no receipt system for prisoner mail. Moreover, unlike McCoy, Dole would have little constitutional recourse if the ARB had refused to hear his untimely claim. Under Pozo, he would have indefinitely failed to exhaust, whereas the McCoy court clearly believed that McCoy would have had a valid argument that he had been procedurally “moustrapped” by the PLRA had his claim been refused. Because Dole was not specifically directed to re-file by the ARB, if he had filed an untimely claim, he might have ultimately prejudiced his case. Defendants also cite Cannon v. Washington, 418 F.3d 714 (7th Cir. 2005), in support of their positions. In that case, an inmate’s complaint to the ARB, which had originally been mailed within the time limits set forth in the regulations, was returned to him because it contained insufficient postage. The prisoner immediately re-sent it with the 12 No. 05-1868 proper postage, but the Board received the complaint after the deadline for filing and marked it untimely. The Board told the prisoner that it might reconsider its denial if he submitted a copy of his original grievance along with a new grievance explaining the delay. Instead of following that procedure, the prisoner wrote to the Director himself to seek reconsideration. The ARB denied the request because the prisoner had not followed the ARB’s instructions. The prisoner raised a mailbox rule argument similar to the one Dole presses here, but the court rejected it. The court found that the original complaint was untimely as of the time that it was re-mailed. The court also ruled that because the prisoner did not follow the instructions that the ARB gave him, his letter to the Director did not exhaust his administrative remedies. Cannon is distinguishable from this case. Cannon himself made not one, but two errors. First, he did not place sufficient postage on his original grievance. Then he did not follow the ARB’s explicit instructions to rectify his original mistake. Such is not the case with Dole. All parties recognize that Dole’s grievance was properly mailed within the correct time frame. Defendants also do not contend that the ARB explicitly instructed Dole on how to proceed after his grievance was lost. Thus, Dole has made neither of the mistakes that handicapped the inmate in Cannon. The other PLRA cases cited by the defendants can be similarly distinguished. In each case, unlike this one, the prisoner’s mistake triggered the exhaustion requirement. See Pozo, 286 F.3d at 1023-24 (“Any other approach would allow a prisoner to ‘exhaust’ state remedies by spurning them, which would defeat the statutory objective . . .”); Dixon v. Page, 291 F.3d 485 (7th Cir. 2002) (prisoner did not exhaust when, after he did not receive the relief he was promised, he did not appeal to the next level of review); Lewis v. Washington, 300 F.3d 829 (7th Cir. 2002) (prisoner’s appeal properly denied as untimely when he had No. 05-1868 13 received notice of denial of a claim yet failed to appeal that claim until his other claims had also been denied). Because Dole properly followed procedure and prison officials were responsible for the mishandling of his grievance, it cannot be said that Dole failed to exhaust his remedies. Although it is possible that our holding would be different if the ARB had given Dole instructions on how to proceed and Dole had ignored or improperly followed those instructions, that is not the situation here. We need not abrogate our holdings in Pozo and Lewis to reach this result. Dole fully complied with Pozo’s strict compliance requirement. He filed his suit “in the place, and at the time, the prison’s administrative rules require.” Pozo, 286 F.3d at 1025. He followed Illinois administrative rules to the letter; his complaint remains unresolved through no apparent fault of his own. In this case, the prison authorities acknowledge the initial deposit of the complaint, and the possibility of fraud in filing does not exist. In this limited context, prison authorities may not employ their own mistake to shield them from possible liability, relying upon the likelihood that a prisoner will not know what to do when a timely appeal is never received. We believe that our holding in Brengettcy v. Horton, 423 F.3d 674 (7th Cir. 2005), supports this conclusion. In that case, a prisoner filed several unanswered grievances and was told by prison officials that “sometimes the grievances get torn up.” He did not file an appeal. This court ruled that Brengettcy had done all that is reasonable to exhaust, because the regulations did not instruct a prisoner on what to do when prison officials did not answer his grievance within the time frame prescribed in the regulations. This case is analogous. The regulations were not clear about how to proceed once a timely grievance was lost. Perhaps the regulation governing untimely grievances was inapplicable here, because Dole’s griev14 No. 05-1868 ance was not untimely but instead a timely complaint that was never received. By properly mailing his ARB complaint, alerting the ARB that the complaint was mailed, and filing suit only after the ARB failed to clarify what he should do next, Dole had done all that was reasonable to exhaust his administrative remedies. The district court found that Dole had not exhausted his remedies in part because of fears that all prison inmates could henceforth avoid the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement simply by claiming that they mailed a letter. However, as explained above, such was not the case here. Moreover, we suggest that future false claims can be minimized by setting up a receipt system for prison mail. We are also mindful of the concerns the Supreme Court expresses in Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266 (1988). Although that case concerned statutory interpretation of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”), and thus is not directly binding here, we find the Court’s logic instructive. The Court in that case ruled that a pro se prisoner’s appeal is “filed” within the meaning of AEDPA when it is placed in the hands of the guards. Certainly this holding would result in the potential for prisoners to fraudulently claim that their appeal was mailed within the statutory deadline when it was actually mailed shortly after that time. The Court chose to accept that risk of fraud, however, reasoning: The situation of prisoners seeking to appeal without the aid of counsel is unique. Such prisoners cannot take the steps other litigants can take to monitor the processing of their notices of appeal and to ensure that the court clerk receives and stamps their notices of appeal before the 30-day deadline. Unlike other litigants, pro se prisoners cannot personally travel to the courthouse to see that the notice is stamped “filed” or to establish the date on which the court received the notice. Other No. 05-1868 15 litigants may choose to entrust their appeals to the vagaries of the mail and the clerk’s process for stamping incoming papers, but only the pro se prisoner is forced to do so by his situation. And if other litigants do choose to use the mail, they can at least place the notice directly into the hands of the United States Postal Service (or a private express carrier); and they can follow its progress by calling the court to determine whether the notice has been received and stamped, knowing that if the mail goes awry they can personally deliver notice at the last moment or that their monitoring will provide them with evidence to demonstrate either excusable neglect or that the notice was not stamped on the date the court received it. Pro se prisoners cannot take any of these precautions; nor, by definition, do they have lawyers who can take these precautions for them. Worse, the pro se prisoner has no choice but to entrust the forwarding of his notice of appeal to prison authorities whom he cannot control or supervise and who may have every incentive to delay. . . . And if there is a delay the prisoner suspects is attributable to the prison authorities, he is unlikely to have any means of proving it, for his confinement prevents him from monitoring the process sufficiently to distinguish delay on the part of prison authorities from slow mail service or the court clerk’s failure to stamp the notice on the date received. . . . [T]he only information he will likely have is the date he delivered the notice to those prison authorities and the date ultimately stamped on his notice. Houston, 447 U.S. at 270-72. The same concerns apply in this case. We believe that the potential for fraud does not justify obligating truthful prisoners to prove that they mailed their complaints when the prison authorities do not provide them with means for verification. 16 No. 05-1868 Defendants argue that our holding would not serve the goals of the PLRA, which they advance as (1) allowing the prison to solve potentially systemic problems outlined in grievances and (2) giving the prison notice that it is in danger of being sued. We conclude that Dole’s complaint could have achieved both, if it had not been misplaced by the very system that, under the defendants’ theory, the PLRA was designed to benefit. Because Dole took all steps necessary to exhaust one line of administrative review, and did not receive instructions on how to proceed once his attempts at review were foiled, in the factual context of this case, he has exhausted his administrative remedies under the PLRA.