Court Opinion

ID: 9402047
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-06-14 21:00:50.84271+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:19:57.093856
License: Public Domain

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                                                 UNPUBLISHED

                                   UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
                                       FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

                                                   No. 21-7195

        CHARLIE L. HARDIN,

                       Plaintiff – Appellant,

                v.

        OFFICER JAMES HUNT; LINDA YORK; CRAIG KENNEDY; MICHAEL
        WARD,

                       Defendants – Appellees.

        ------------------------------

        AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION; AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES
        UNION OF NORTH CAROLINA; AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF
        VIRGINIA FOUNDATION; NORTH CAROLINA PRISONER LEGAL
        SERVICES, INCORPORATED,

                       Amici Supporting Appellant.

        Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, at
        Raleigh. Terrence W. Boyle, District Judge. (5:20-ct-03122-BO)

        Submitted: April 12, 2023                                            Decided: June 13, 2023

        Before WILKINSON, AGEE, and HEYTENS, Circuit Judges.

        Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.
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        ON BRIEF: Easha Anand, San Francisco, California, Rosalind Dillon, Chicago, Illinois,
        Katherine Cion, Christina N. Davis, RODERICK & SOLANGE MACARTHUR JUSTICE
        CENTER, Washington, D.C., for Appellant. Stephanie A. Brennan, Special Deputy
        Attorney General, Bettina Roberts, Assistant Attorney General, NORTH CAROLINA
        DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellees. Eugene Gelernter,
        Ian D. Eppler, PATTERSON BELKNAP WEBB & TYLER LLP, New York, New York,
        for Amici Curiae.

        Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.

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        PER CURIAM:

               State inmate Charlie Hardin appeals the district court’s dismissal of his pro se action

        for failure to exhaust his administrative remedies before filing suit, as required by the

        Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (“PLRA”). We affirm.

                                                      I.

               In March 2020, Hardin filed a pro se 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action alleging various

        constitutional claims against several named and unnamed prison officials at Tabor

        Correctional Institution in North Carolina. The claims generally stemmed from an alleged

        altercation between Hardin and other inmates for which Hardin says prison officials

        unjustly punished him. There is no dispute that Hardin had not fully exhausted his

        administrative remedies as to any claim before filing his complaint in federal court.

               Several months later, Hardin filed an amended complaint with leave of the court.

        The amended complaint named new defendants, but, as Hardin acknowledges in his

        opening brief, all the claims “centered on the same underlying sequence of events” alleged

        in the initial complaint. Opening Br. 2; accord id. at 8 (stating that the claims in the

        amended and initial complaints were “based on the same underlying events”). By the time

        Hardin filed his amended complaint, he had fully exhausted his administrative remedies as

        to at least some of his claims.

               The district court sua sponte conducted a frivolity review of the amended complaint

        under 28 U.S.C. § 1915 and dismissed all claims except the Eighth Amendment-based

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        § 1983 claims against the four named defendant prison officials in this appeal: James Hunt,

        Linda York, Craig Kennedy, and Michael Ward (collectively, the “Prison Officials”).

               The Prison Officials moved to dismiss the remaining claims for failure to exhaust

        under the PLRA. In their motion, the Prison Officials stressed that, although some of

        Hardin’s administrative grievances had been fully exhausted when the amended complaint

        was filed, none of those grievances had been fully exhausted when the original complaint

        was filed. Maintaining that the PLRA doesn’t permit exhaustion of remedies during the

        pendency of litigation, they posited that Hardin’s entire action was subject to dismissal.

               Treating the motion as one for summary judgment, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(d), the

        district court agreed with the Prison Officials, entered judgment in their favor, and

        dismissed the action without prejudice.

               Hardin timely appealed. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. See Britt v.

        DeJoy, 45 F.4th 790, 796 (4th Cir. 2022) (en banc) (holding that a without-prejudice

        dismissal of all claims constitutes a final and appealable order when, as here, the district

        court does not provide leave to amend). 1

               1
                The Prison Officials also tell us this case should be dismissed as moot because
        Hardin has filed a parallel action in the same district court, which is currently stayed
        pending this appeal. Because “we may consider certain threshold issues, like exhaustion of
        remedies, before considering Article III jurisdictional issues” like mootness, K.I. v.
        Durham Pub. Schs. Bd. of Educ., 54 F.4th 779, 788 n.3 (4th Cir. 2022), we need not reach
        the mootness question presented here.

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                                                     II.

               We review de novo the district court’s award of summary judgment. Moss v.

        Harwood, 19 F.4th 614, 621 (4th Cir. 2021). Summary judgment is appropriate only “if

        the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant

        is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a).

                                                     III.

               Under the PLRA, “[n]o action shall be brought with respect to prison conditions

        under [42 U.S.C. § 1983], or any other Federal law, by a prisoner confined in any jail,

        prison, or other correctional facility until such administrative remedies as are available are

        exhausted.” 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). As the Supreme Court has explained, “[t]here is no

        question that exhaustion is mandatory under the PLRA and that unexhausted claims cannot

        be brought in court.” Jones v. Bock, 549 U.S. 199, 211 (2007); see also Williams v.

        Carvajal, 63 F.4th 279, 285 (4th Cir. 2023) (“This exhaustion requirement means what it

        says[.]”). And no combination of “special circumstances” can excuse a prisoner’s failure

        to exhaust. Ross v. Blake, 578 U.S. 632, 639 (2016).

               Despite this clear rule and Hardin’s undisputed failure to comply with it before filing

        suit, Hardin nonetheless contends that his action should be allowed to proceed because he

        fully exhausted his administrative remedies as to at least some of his claims before filing

        his amended complaint. Pointing to Jones, Hardin says that the PLRA’s exhaustion

        requirement operates on a claim-by-claim basis. See 549 U.S. at 219–224 (concluding that

        the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement’s “no action shall be brought” phrasing does not

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        require dismissal of an entire action on account of unexhausted claims when other claims

        have been properly exhausted (emphasis added)). And because each of the Prison Officials

        was named for the first time in the amended complaint, he argues that the claims against

        them are “new” and thus were not “brought” until after he fully exhausted his

        administrative remedies. Opening Br. 14. Alternatively, Hardin argues that Federal Rule

        of Civil Procedure 15 allows a PLRA plaintiff to cure an “exhaustion defect” by filing an

        amended complaint once exhaustion is complete. Opening Br. 19. We are not persuaded

        by either argument.

               Regardless of whether he named “new” defendants in the amended complaint,

        Hardin has conceded on appeal that all the claims in the amended complaint are “based on

        the same underlying events” as the (then-unexhausted) claims in the original complaint.

        Opening Br. 8. For purposes of the PLRA, that concession is fatal to Hardin’s suit.

               As the Supreme Court explained in Jones, a central purpose of the PLRA’s

        exhaustion requirement is to “allow[] a prison to address complaints about the program it

        administers before being subjected to suit,” not to “promote early notice to those [particular

        prison officials] who might later be sued.” 549 U.S. at 219 (emphasis added); see id. at

        217–19 (rejecting the Sixth Circuit’s atextual procedural rule that a prisoner must have

        specifically identified in his administrative grievance each defendant later sued to satisfy

        the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement); see also Johnson v. Johnson, 385 F.3d 503, 522 (5th

        Cir. 2004) (“[T]he primary purpose of a grievance is to alert prison officials to a problem,

        not to provide personal notice to a particular official that he may be sued[.]”).

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               For that reason, we think it immaterial that Hardin’s amended complaint named

        “new” defendants, because that mere act did not create “new” claims for purposes of PLRA

        exhaustion. Indeed, as the Tenth Circuit has observed, “Jones teaches that, although adding

        or substituting a defendant may create a new claim for some purposes, it does not do so for

        purposes of the PLRA exhaustion requirement.” May v. Segovia, 929 F.3d 1223, 1230

        (10th Cir. 2019) (emphasis omitted)); see also Chambers v. Sood, 956 F.3d 979, 984–85

        (7th Cir. 2020) (“Chambers’s claim against Dr. Sood is not new; it’s the same claim he

        raised in his original pro se complaint, albeit against “Unknown Doctor #1.”).

               Instead, all that matters here is that, based on Hardin’s own admissions, the claims

        in the amended complaint are predicated on the same underlying facts alleged in the

        original complaint. It is those underlying alleged facts that the prison must have the

        opportunity to fully investigate and assess before being haled into court. See Jones, 549

        U.S. at 219. The prison was not given that opportunity here. Thus, Hardin failed to exhaust

        his administrative remedies under the PLRA.

               Moreover, Hardin’s noncompliance with the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement

        cannot be “cured” by amendment under Rule 15, as several of our sister circuits have

        observed. See, e.g., Chambers, 956 F.3d at 984; May, 929 F.3d at 1229. 2 The only “cure”

        for failure to exhaust in the PLRA context is the filing of a new action once exhaustion is

        complete.

               2
                  We too have previously held, albeit in unpublished opinions, that Rule 15
        amendment cannot be used to circumvent the PLRA’s pre-suit exhaustion requirement.
        See, e.g., Hayes v. Stanley, 204 F. App’x 304, 304 n.1 (4th Cir. 2006) (per curiam).

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              The district court therefore was right to dismiss Hardin’s action without prejudice

        for failure to exhaust. Any potential relief to which Hardin has a right regarding these

        claims must be sought in a new action.

                                                  IV.

              Accordingly, we affirm the judgment below.

                                                                                    AFFIRMED

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