Opinion ID: 3031007
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The PLRA’s Exhaustion Requirement Is More

Text: Like Administrative Exhaustion The exhaustion doctrine has also been used in administrative law. Exhaustion in the administrative context protects an 3606 NGO v. WOODFORD administrative agency’s authority. See McCarthy, 503 U.S. at 145. In addition, administrative exhaustion “promotes judicial efficiency” by allowing the agency the opportunity to correct its own errors and to create a record which might facilitate judicial review. Id. [7] In cases involving other federal statutes, the Supreme Court has stated that administrative exhaustion does not include a procedural default component. For example, in EEOC v. Commercial Office Products Co., 486 U.S. 107 (1988), the Supreme Court held that a Title VII complainant’s untimely grievance was irrelevant in determining whether she could proceed to federal court. See id. at 123. Similarly, in Oscar Mayer & Co., the Court held that state procedural defaults in claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act “cannot foreclose federal relief.” 441 U.S. at 762; see also id. at 759 (“[T]here is no [statutory] requirement that, in order to commence state proceedings and thereby preserve federal rights, the grievant must file with the State within whatever time limits are specified by state law.”). Thus, a procedural default has not been implanted into either the Age Discrimination in Employment Act’s or Title VII’s exhaustion requirements. Both cases give us pause about imposing a sanction that bars claims which failed to comply with administrative timing deadlines, in the absence of any statutory direction to do so. Cf. Franklin, 290 F.3d at 1231 (explaining that the “long-established differences between the exhaustion requirement and the procedural default doctrine preclude any conclusion that Congress implicitly intended to reach” one by a statutory reference to the other); Patsy, 457 U.S. at 514 (reasoning that the “difficult questions concerning the design and scope of an exhaustion requirement . . . might be answered swiftly and surely by legislation”). Moreover, such a scheme would penalize the less sophisticated and less informed who are unable to satisfy complex NGO v. WOODFORD 3607 and demanding procedural requirements, regardless of the merits of their claims. Cf. McCarthy, 503 U.S. at 153 (“As a practical matter, the filing deadlines . . . may pose little difficulty for the knowledgeable inmate accustomed to grievances and court actions. But they are a likely trap for the inexperienced and unwary inmate, ordinarily indigent and unrepresented by counsel, with a substantial claim.”). Congress intended § 1997e(a) “to reduce the quantity and improve the quality of prisoner suits.” Porter, 534 U.S. at 524. Merging procedural default with the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement, though, would potentially reduce the quantity of meritorious suits and would not necessarily improve the quality of the surviving suits. In addition, neither the interests of federalism nor comity are served by imposing a procedural default component on the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement. We recognize that procedural bars will certainly filter out some suits brought by prisoners. But neither can we be blind to “the serious impact on prisoners with legitimate claims who are unrepresented, unschooled in litigation, and often illequipped to negotiate an administrative system far harsher in its procedural requirements than state or federal courts.”4 Kermit Roosevelt III, Exhaustion Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act: The Consequence of Procedural Error, 52 Emory L.J. 1771, 1813 (2003). [8] In sum, the PLRA exhaustion requirement tends to resemble administrative exhaustion. Thus, the reasons for utilizing procedural default doctrine in the habeas context are generally irrelevant to prisoner suits under the PLRA. There 4 For instance, the current limitations period for § 1983 actions in California is two years. See Jones v. Blanas, 393 F.3d 918, 927 (9th Cir. 2004). If the plaintiff is a California inmate the statute of limitations would effectively shrink to fifteen working days under the procedural bar rule adopted in cases like Pozo. See Cal. Code Regs. tit. 15, §§ 3084.3(c)(6), 3084.5(a)(1), 3084.6(c). The purpose of the PLRA was to reduce the number of meritless lawsuits, not simply to make things harder for inmates, irrespective of the merits of their claims. 3608 NGO v. WOODFORD is no need for us to convert a rule governing the timing of lawsuits into one that bars them entirely.