Court Opinion

ID: 9699962
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 21:01:08.254755+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:59:37.697444
License: Public Domain

In the

    United States Court of Appeals
                 For the Seventh Circuit
                     ____________________
No. 22-2458
LEE A. BROWN,
                                                  Plaintiff-Appellant,
                                 v.

MICHAEL MEISNER, et al.,
                                               Defendants-Appellees.
                     ____________________

         Appeal from the United States District Court for the
                    Eastern District of Wisconsin.
          No. 2:21-cv-00542-BHL — Brett H. Ludwig, Judge.
                     ____________________

    ARGUED AUGUST 1, 2023 — DECIDED AUGUST 25, 2023
               ____________________

   Before WOOD, HAMILTON, and KIRSCH, Circuit Judges.
    HAMILTON, Circuit Judge. The central issue in this appeal is
whether plaintiﬀ-appellant Lee Brown, a Wisconsin prisoner,
alleged a viable claim that prison oﬃcials violated Title II of
the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. § 12132,
by denying his request for accommodation of his injured
knee. The district court dismissed Brown’s ADA claim on the
pleadings for failure to state a claim. We ﬁnd that he alleged
2                                                 No. 22-2458

everything needed to assert an ADA claim. We vacate that
portion of the judgment and remand.
    Brown’s pro se amended complaint supplies the operative
factual allegations, which we construe liberally and take as
true. Erickson v. Pardus, 551 U.S. 89, 94 (2007). Brown injured
his knee when he fell at his former prison. He received medi-
cal care there and was placed on “special needs,” which in-
cluded being assigned a lower bunk, a wheelchair, and
crutches. Several weeks later, Brown was transferred to his
current prison, Oshkosh Correctional Institution. Over the
ﬁrst few months there he spent time in segregation. Brown
asked several times for medical help but received none. He
was later moved to a shared cell where his cellmate, who was
disabled, slept in the lower bunk. While climbing to his top
bunk, Brown fell. Afterward, Brown saw a doctor who said
that Brown needed surgery on his knee but that the prison
would not provide it because he was “too young.”
    Brown then asked the prison’s “special needs committee”
to provide him “accommodations,” and he “ﬁled an ADA rea-
sonable accommodation request.” Through these requests
and his medical history, he alleges, prison oﬃcials knew
about his serious medical needs but failed to protect him from
further harm and “kept him in imminent danger by denying
him reasonable accommodations or treatment.”
    Brown’s initial complaint named more than twenty de-
fendants over thirty pages. In it, he speciﬁed that he was ac-
commodated with a lower bunk at his prior prison and that
he later requested the same “reasonable accommodations” at
Oshkosh, including “a low bunk.” He alleged that the defend-
ants denied that request, apparently concluding that his knee
injury was “not a disability.” He also alleged more generally
No. 22-2458                                                   3

that defendants violated his Eighth Amendment rights by de-
liberately ignoring his medical needs. The district court
screened the original complaint under 28 U.S.C. § 1915A(a)
and dismissed it for not providing a “short and plain state-
ment” of any claim within the terms of Federal Rule of Civil
Procedure 8. The court told Brown he could amend his com-
plaint if he pared it down to no more than ten pages.
    Brown followed the instruction and ﬁled a much shorter
amended complaint. Most relevant to this appeal, he repeated
that his prior prison had accommodated his knee’s “special
needs” by assigning him a low bunk and that his current
prison was denying him an “accommodation” for his knee.
He asked for injunctive relief to provide “necessary accom-
modations to mitigate [his] severe pain, injuries, [and] exacer-
bation of [his] known painful condition.” He also asked for
compensatory and punitive damages. The district court al-
lowed him to proceed on a separate Eighth Amendment claim
against Dawn Fofana, a manager of the Health Services Unit,
for failing to provide medical care while he was in segrega-
tion. The court dismissed the remainder of his complaint, in-
cluding the ADA claim, writing that Brown had “not allege[d]
any facts that would implicate the ADA” because “[h]e only
alleges inadequate medical treatment, which is not a proper
claim under the ADA.” The court later entered summary
judgment for Fofana on Brown’s Eighth Amendment claim,
ﬁnding that she had not been involved in his medical care.
    On appeal, Brown does not contest summary judgment in
favor of Fofana on the Eighth Amendment claim. He contends
only that he alleged a viable failure-to-accommodate claim in
his amended complaint. The pleading standard Brown must
meet “is not an exacting standard.” Jaros v. Illinois Dep’t of
4                                                    No. 22-2458

Corrections, 684 F.3d 667, 672 (7th Cir. 2012) (reversing dismis-
sal of prisoner’s claims under ADA and Rehabilitation Act).
“Speciﬁc facts are not necessary” under Rule 8 because the
plaintiﬀ “need only give the defendant fair notice of what
the … claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.” Swanson
v. Citibank, N.A., 614 F.3d 400, 404 (7th Cir. 2010), quoting Er-
ickson, 551 U.S. at 93. Brown’s complaint did not need to iden-
tify any particular legal theory, nor did it need to allege all
legal elements of a particular claim. E.g., Zimmerman v.
Bornick, 25 F.4th 491, 493 (7th Cir. 2022) (collecting authorities
and reversing dismissal of prisoner’s complaint without leave
to amend).
    To state a claim under Title II of the ADA, Brown needed
only to plead facts suggesting that he is a “qualiﬁed individ-
ual with a disability” who “by reason of such disability” was
“denied the beneﬁts of the services, programs, or activities of
a public entity.” 42 U.S.C. § 12132. An allegation that the de-
fendants failed to make reasonable accommodations can state
a violation of Title II of the ADA. E.g., Shaw v. Kemper, 52 F.4th
331, 334 (7th Cir. 2022), citing § 12132 and 28 C.F.R.
§ 35.130(b)(7)(i) (reversing dismissal of prisoner’s Title II
claim).
    Brown’s amended complaint states a plausible claim for
relief under Title II of the ADA. The defendants accept at least
for purposes of this appeal that Brown’s alleged knee injury
renders him disabled within the meaning of the ADA. But
they insist that Brown’s amended complaint “focuses solely”
on “the medical care he received for his knee” and never al-
leged a failure to accommodate that disability. That simply is
not correct. Brown’s amended complaint included Eighth
Amendment claims for deliberate indiﬀerence to his serious
No. 22-2458                                                                 5

medical needs, but he also alleged failure to accommodate his
disability. Brown alleged that after he fell from his top bunk
at Oshkosh, he asked the prison for “an ADA reasonable ac-
commodation” to mitigate his “severe pain” and to prevent
“further harm” to his disabled knee. Despite their knowledge
of his condition and his fall, he alleged, prison oﬃcials “kept
him in imminent danger by denying him reasonable accom-
modations.” Those allegations gave fair notice to prison oﬃ-
cials that Brown was suing for failing to accommodate his dis-
abling knee condition at Oshkosh. See Jaros, 684 F.3d at 672.
    The defendants oﬀer two counterarguments that are not
persuasive. First, they argue Brown failed to state an ADA
claim because he did not specify in his amended complaint
that the speciﬁc accommodation he requested was a “lower
bunk.” No rule of law required Brown to identify a particular
accommodation in his complaint. See Swanson, 614 F.3d
at 404. Nor would such a pleading requirement make sense
for an ADA claim. A covered entity has considerable ﬂexibil-
ity in deciding about how a disability will be accommodated.
E.g., EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 417 F.3d 789, 802 (7th Cir.
2005) (citation omitted). 1

    1 The parties debate on appeal whether Brown can rely on his original

complaint, which the district court struck. The original complaint speci-
fied the lower bunk accommodation he wanted, but the district court
struck that pleading for not being a short and plain statement of any
claims for relief. The defense argument seems like a whipsaw, or perhaps
an echo of the story of Goldilocks, asking the district court to work with a
plaintiff so that he alleges not too much and not too little, but gets it just
right. This defense argument invites district courts to waste time on a ster-
ile task of fine-tuning pleadings. In the end, however, we need not decide
whether and to what extent Brown may rely on his stricken complaint.
6                                                     No. 22-2458

    Second, the defendants contend that Brown’s ADA claim
fails under Bryant v. Madigan, 84 F.3d 246, 249 (7th Cir. 1996),
where we held that the ADA “does not create a remedy for
medical malpractice.” (The district court, too, quoted Bryant
in concluding that inadequate medical treatment cannot be
redressed under the ADA.) We agree with that statement in
Bryant, but Brown’s claim for failure to accommodate is not
about allegedly substandard medical care. His claim is that
the defendants failed to accommodate his disabling knee con-
dition when they denied him a lower bunk, and perhaps other
accommodations. That claim does not involve allegations of
medical malpractice, so the rule of Bryant does not bar it.
    The defendants also raise additional issues that we need
not resolve here. All agree that if Brown stated a claim under
the ADA—which he did—we must remand the case so that he
can pursue at least injunctive relief. The ADA claim went oﬀ
the rails at the very outset of this case, and our remand will
call for a reset in the district court to get the failure-to-accom-
modate claim back on track. The defendants will have the op-
portunity on remand to raise defenses, such as sovereign im-
munity, and plaintiﬀ may be able to raise other legal theories
that could support both money damages and injunctive relief,
including the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794. That Act is,
for practical purposes, the same as the ADA, Shaw, 52 F.4th
at 334, except that it circumvents “the thorny question of sov-
ereign immunity.” Jaros, 684 F.3d at 672. See generally Shaw,
52 F.4th at 333–35 (reversing dismissal of prisoner’s claims un-
der ADA and Rehabilitation Act); Koger v. Dart, 950 F.3d 971,
974–75 (7th Cir. 2020) (remanding some of prisoner’s claims

(Was it struck correctly or erroneously? Shouldn’t that matter?) His
amended complaint was legally sufficient.
No. 22-2458                                                7

after improper dismissal on pleadings). We leave the needed
reset to the district court’s sound discretion.
    A ﬁnal note about the caption. At screening, the district
court dismissed every defendant other than Fofana, and the
court later entered summary judgment for her on Brown’s
Eighth Amendment claim. On appeal, Fofana was initially the
only listed defendant, but Brown has pursued only claims
that do not seem to involve her. We amend the caption to in-
clude all the defendants listed in Brown’s amended com-
plaint. On remand, the district court may consider whether it
should dismiss any other defendants because they were not
involved in the decision to deny Brown accommodations for
his injured knee.
    Accordingly, we AFFIRM summary judgment in favor of
defendant Fofana, VACATE all other portions of the judg-
ment, and REMAND for further proceedings consistent with
this opinion.