Opinion ID: 2805159
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Severance Order

Text: We review a court’s decision to sever claims for abuse of discretion. Gaffney, 451 F.3d at 442; Rice v. Sunrise Express, Inc., 209 F.3d 1008, 1016 (7th Cir. 2000). The same standard of review applies to the denial of a Rule 15(a) motion to amend—which, as we’ve said, is the procedural device the magistrate judge should have proposed and how Taylor’s response to the show-cause order should have been construed. Adams v. City of Indianapolis, 742 F.3d 720, 727 (7th Cir. 2014). If Taylor timely complied with the judge’s explicit instructions on how to dismiss his claim against Officer Brown and thereby avoid severance, it certainly would have been an abuse of discretion to ignore his motion for voluntary dismissal of Count 3 and sever the claims anyway. We note, of course, that when the judge found that “[n]o objections are on file” and issued the severance order, he did not know that Taylor had attempted to file his response on July 11, two days before the deadline. So the initial severance order was not an abuse of discretion. However, the prison mailbox rule requires that courts reassess their orders once the rule has been invoked. In this case, the judge not only failed to reassess whether the severance was proper, he never acknowledged that the prison mailbox rule was in play—even after both parties brought the rule to his attention. Officer Brown first referred to the prison mailbox rule in his August 18 motion to dismiss. Taylor’s subsequent filings provided detailed narratives of his attempts to file his response to the show-cause order. And although Taylor didn’t reference the prison mailbox rule by name, he clearly invoked the principle when he asked the court to “accept the 16 No. 12-1710 [p]laintiff’s argument and the State’s Attorney[’s] argument that the [p]laintiff has absolutely no control on when outgoing mail goes out.” The relief he sought aligned exactly with that which Officer Brown had himself requested: “The [p]laintiff is asking that since the [p]laintiff is voluntarily requesting the [c]ourt to dismiss Count III that no further charges be [assessed] to the [p]laintiff’s account.” Likewise, in his August 29 response to the court’s order instructing him to pay the filing fee, Taylor reiterated that he “had absolutely no control of the Motion to Dismiss being electronically sent to the court” and asked the court to “rule favorably on the Motion to Dismiss.”11 Despite the fact that the prison mailbox rule lay at the heart of Officer Brown’s motion to dismiss and Taylor’s responses, the district judge never mentioned the rule in his order denying the motion to dismiss (which also denied Taylor’s motions as “moot”). Rather, the court characterized Officer Brown’s argument as merely advancing the theory that “this case should be dismissed because Taylor agreed to the severance of Count III of his complaint in [the 104 Case] only reluctantly.” That understanding of the facts was clearly faulty. In his response to the show-cause order, Taylor didn’t reluctantly agree to sever Count 3—he 11 There’s a minor ambiguity regarding whether Taylor’s request that the court “rule favorably on the Motion to Dismiss” referred to Officer Brown’s motion to dismiss or to his own response to the show-cause order, which Taylor had referred to as a motion to dismiss earlier in the document. But Officer Brown’s motion to dismiss argued that the court should give effect to Taylor’s response to the show-cause order, so the relief that Taylor was requesting was the same under either interpretation. No. 12-1710 17 reluctantly agreed to voluntarily dismiss Count 3. The judge’s misunderstanding of Taylor’s wishes was compounded by his misapprehension that Taylor had already applied to proceed IFP in the 631 Case. If that were true, it would certainly have been a strong indication that Taylor wanted his suit against Officer Brown to survive. But, of course, it wasn’t true. The judge issued a clarification order the next day but never reexamined the implications of his mistaken assumption, nor did he confront Taylor’s multiple filings requesting the voluntary dismissal of his claim against Officer Brown in accord with the proposal made by the magistrate judge in the show-cause order. In sum, the court overlooked the prison mailbox rule throughout the course of this litigation even though both parties agreed that the rule applied, making Taylor’s motion to voluntarily dismiss timely and thus averting the severance. By denying, sub silentio, Taylor’s motion to dismiss Count 3 and instead severing that count to create the 631 Case, the court abused its discretion. When a court overlooks the prison mailbox rule, it’s often necessary to remand for additional fact-finding to ensure that the filing was, in fact, timely under the rule. But Officer Brown conceded below that Taylor qualified for the prison mailbox rule, so he’s waived any argument on appeal that Taylor did not qualify. See Hale v. Chu, 614 F.3d 741, 744 (7th Cir. 2010) (“It is well-established that a party waives the right to argue an issue on appeal if he fails to raise that issue before the district court.”). In situations where the rule serves to give a court jurisdiction over a matter that would otherwise be time-barred, the court has an independent duty to ensure that the prisoner actually sent his mail when he 18 No. 12-1710 says he did—the opposing party’s waiver may not be enough. In those cases, prisoners are often required to submit a notarized affidavit attesting to the circumstances of the filing, see, e.g., FED. R. APP. P. 4(c), and sometimes additional documentary or testimonial evidence is required, see Ray, 700 F.3d at 1011–12. Here, Taylor provided both a sworn affidavit and documentary evidence in his second Rule 60(b) motion. Ordinarily, the basis for a successive Rule 60(b) motion must not have been available when the first one was filed, see Servants of the Paraclete v. Does, 204 F.3d 1005, 1012 (10th Cir. 2000), but here “the district court did not provide the appellant with an opportunity to prove that his [late-received documents] were filed in a timely manner,” Thompson v. Rasberry, 993 F.2d 513, 515 (5th Cir. 1993) (per curiam). See also Grady v. United States, 269 F.3d 913, 918 (8th Cir. 2001) (“[T]he prisoner must at some point attest to [the date of the filing] in an affidavit or notarized statement.” (emphasis added)). In a case like this in which a nonjurisdictional deadline was at stake and the opposing party conceded below that the mailbox rule applies and there is an affidavit from the prisoner in the record, we see no reason to remand for additional fact-finding. Accordingly, we VACATE the order dismissing the 631 Case with prejudice and taxing Officer Brown’s costs against Taylor. We REMAND for further proceedings consistent with this opinion, including the reimbursement of any fees Taylor has paid toward the 631 Case filing fee or toward Brown’s litigation expenses.