Court Opinion

ID: 9496262
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:21:52.428626+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:27.622956
License: Public Domain

GILMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I fully concur in Judge Moore’s opinion. My purpose in writing separately is to acknowledge the difficulty of the issue before us and to explain why I believe that Judge Rosen’s opinion is less persuasive in interpreting what it means to exhaust “available administrative remedies” under the PLRA.
To begin with, I must confess that I find the question of whether a prisoner must comply with the prison’s administrative deadlines as a precondition to filing a § 1983 action in federal court to be extremely difficult. I have indeed flip-flopped on this issue during the course of extensive deliberations with my two erudite colleagues, no doubt to the frustration of them both. The assertiveness of Judge Rosen’s opinion is more than sufficient to give anyone pause, especially his accusations that we have issued an “invitation to chaos and delay” (Dissenting Op. at 738), “abandonfed] all notions of judicial restraint” (id. at 738), provided “a classic example of judicial meddling” (id. at 738), and engaged in “thinly-veiled policymak-ing” (id. at 739). In the end, however, I find that these sweeping generalizations generate more heat than light, and that his position is actually the more “activist” in an expansive interpretation of the PLRA beyond Congress’s language and the Supreme Court’s precedents.
*736The heart of the problem is that the failure to apply the concept of procedural default to a prison’s administrative deadlines will, in cases such as the one before us, obligate the federal courts to deal with the § 1983 issues without the benefit of the state’s administrative consideration on the merits. This makes the issue difficult for me because, were I a legislator, I would think it sound policy to require prisoners to comply with reasonable administrative deadlines. On the other hand, as pointed out by Judge Moore, this legitimate concern “is counterbalanced by the equally real concern that in the presence of procedural default standards, prison administrators will impose shorter and shorter deadlines measured in hours and days, because prisoners will then have no recourse to the federal courts if they miss even one deadline.” (Maj. Op. at 732 n. 4) These competing policy considerations, however, are better reserved for Congress to resolve than for us to adjudicate.
In deciding this issue, the two factors that ultimately persuade me are that (1) Congress could have, but did not, specify that a prisoner’s failure to comply with the prison’s reasonable time limitations would result in a procedural default (see Maj. Op. at 730-731), and (2) Supreme Court precedents continue to distinguish between the concepts of exhaustion of remedies and procedural default. Congress, if it desires a different outcome, is clearly able to make an appropriate amendment to the PLRA. Judge Rosen or I might have drafted the current statute differently, but we are not legislators. As a judge on the court of appeals, I do not feel that I should attempt to alter the PLRA as it presently stands.
Judge Rosen obviously subscribes to a different analysis. In his opinion, the concept of procedural default is built into the concept of exhaustion of remedies. But the Supreme Court cases that he relies on — Boerckel, Carpenter, and Coleman— do not, in my opinion, support his analysis.
Judge Rosen, for example, quotes the Supreme Court’s statement in O’Sullivan v. Boerckel, 526 U.S. 838, 119 S.Ct. 1728, 144 L.Ed.2d 1 (1999), that “we ask not only whether a prisoner has exhausted his state remedies, but also whether he has properly exhausted those remedies.” Id. at 848, 119 S.Ct. 1728 (emphasis in original). If procedural default were a necessary component of exhaustion in the habeas corpus context (rather than an independent, complementary doctrine), this sentence would make no sense. The Supreme Court would instead have simply stated: “We ask whether a prisoner has exhausted his state remedies.” What the Supreme Court actually said, however, is that “we ask not only whether a prisoner has exhausted his state remedies, but also whether he has properly exhausted those remedies.” Id. (first two emphases added; third emphasis in original). Basic English grammar, not “adroit deconstruction” (Dissenting Op. at 747), therefore compels the conclusion that, under the Supreme Court’s, exhaustion and procedural default are two distinct concepts. Carpenter and Coleman make the same differentiation. Carpenter, 529 U.S. 446, 453, 120 S.Ct. 1587, 146 L.Ed.2d 518 (2000); Coleman, 501 U.S. 722, 732, 111 S.Ct. 2546, 115 L.Ed.2d 640 (1991).
In the final analysis, my policy maker heart yearns for the result proposed by Judge Rosen, but my judicial head tells me that Judge Moore has reached the correct result. Our legal system requires us to heed the words of Congress as interpreted by applicable Supreme Court precedent. Until Congress changes the law or the Supreme Court corrects our interpretation of its language, I am unwilling to read the concept of procedural default into the PLRA.