ELIJAH REID, Plаintiff-Appellant, v. MARC BALOTA, Correctional Officer, Defendant-Appellee.
No. 19-1396
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
Argued April 28, 2020 — Decided June 16, 2020
Before EASTERBROOK, RIPPLE, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.
I.
BACKGROUND
A. Facts
We present the facts in the light most favorable to Mr. Reid. King v. McCarty, 781 F.3d 889, 895 (7th Cir. 2015). In his complaint, Mr. Reid, who adheres to a vegan diet for rеligious reasons, alleged that when he told Officer Marc Balota that he had been given the wrong meal, the Officer reacted by slamming a fist full of keys against one of Mr. Reid’s hands, breaking it. Officer Balota told Mr. Reid, who is African-American, “you [are] going [to] get w[hat] the f*** I give you n****r.”2
Mr. Reid complained about this treatment through the prison’s grievance process. According to the version of the Illinois Administrative Code in effect at the time, that process has three steps: (1) the inmate submits a grievance to a
On the day of the incident, July 28, 2016, Mr. Reid filed two grievances. He filed a “standard grievance” (i.e., the first of the three steps) with the prison’s grievance officer, who logged it as having been received on August 2. He also filed a copy of this grievance with the warden on an emergency basis, the alternative step when а situation involves a risk of imminent or irreparable harm.
On August 9, Mr. Reid received a communication about each of his grievances. The warden returned the emergency grievance with a checked-box response stating that “an emergency is not substantiated [and Mr. Reid] should submit this grievance in the normal manner.”3 Mr. Reid also received a memorandum, which the grievance officer had completed on a stock form. On the memorandum, the grievance officer checked the box to indicate that she was returning the grievance to Mr. Reid because the “issue has been
Mr. Reid submitted an appeal to the Administrative Review Board on August 15. He attached both the grievance officer’s memorandum and the returned emergency grievance. The Board returned the appeal to Mr. Reid, stating that, in order to appeal, he should have provided two specific documents—a copy of his standard grievance, including the counselor’s response, if available, and the “Doc. 0047” form, which the warden issues and which sets forth the responses of the grievance officer and the warden. The Board did not check the box that stated, “Please return the attached grievance or correspondence with the additional information requested.”6
On August 24, Mr. Reid filed with the warden a second emergеncy grievance. In it, he repeated his allegations against Officer Balota and protested that no one had responded to the standard grievance he previously had submitted. Without ruling on the merits of the grievance, the warden again denied that there was any emergency.
Three weеks later, on September 15, the Board returned Mr. Reid’s subsequent appeal. The Board, once again, instructed Mr. Reid that to appeal, he needed to attach his standard grievance and a Doc. 0047 form bearing responses
B. Procedural History
In Octоber 2016, Mr. Reid brought this action against Officer Balota and several other prison officials. Because Mr. Reid is a prisoner, the district court screened his complaint under
On remand, Officer Balota moved for summary judgment. He asserted the affirmative defense that Mr. Reid had failed to exhaust the prisоn’s administrative remedies before filing suit, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act,
The district court entered summary judgment for Officer Balota, ruling that Mr. Reid had failed to exhaust his administrative remedies. Regarding the standard grievance, the court explained that the prison had responded to it through the grievance officer’s memorandum, but Mr. Reid “abandoned any further еfforts at exhaustion” because it was “not clear whether he included this [memorandum] in his appeal to the [Administrative Review Board].”9 The court also determined that Mr. Reid, who filed suit “only nine weeks after submitt[ing] the standard … grievance,” acted too soon because an Internal Affairs “investigation was рending,” and the warden had “two months to make a decision” after receiving a recommendation from the grievance officer.10 As for the emergency grievances, the court ruled that the Board gave Mr. Reid “an opportunity to exhaust” when it told him to attach specific documents to his аppeal, and he “failed to take advantage” of that procedure.11
Mr. Reid filed a motion to alter the judgment under
II.
DISCUSSION
The sole issue before us is whether Mr. Reid exhausted the prison’s available administrative remedies before bringing this action. Specifically, we must consider whether any further administrative avenue was open to Mr. Reid, given the prison’s confusing responses and its failure to resolve his standard grievance. Because exhaustion is an affirmative defense, Officer Balota bears the burden to show that remedies were available and that Mr. Reid failed to use them. Hernandez v. Dart, 814 F.3d 836, 840 (7th Cir. 2016). We review de novo the grant of summary judgment for failure to exhaust. Id.
The Prison Litigation Reform Act prohibits an inmate from suing over prison conditions under
The exhaustion requirement, however, “hinges on the ‘availab[ility]’ of administrative remedies: An inmate, that is,
Recently, in Williams v. Wexford Health Sources, Inc., 957 F.3d 828 (7th Cir. 2020), we emphasized the importance of clear administrative schemes for processing prison grievances. “Grievance procedures must be transparent. This helps everyone: the institution is better able to investigate and resolve grievanсes if they are presented under a well-understood system, and inmates are better able to comply with institutional expectations if the rules are clear.” Id. at 834. In Williams, an Illinois prisoner appealed the denial of his emergency grievance, and the Administrative Review Board returned the appeal in the same manner it did Mr. Reid’s: the Board checked the box stating that the appeal was missing specific documents, but not the one stating that the prisoner should resubmit the appeal with those documents. We concluded that the prisoner, who did not resub-
In the present case, we conclude that the prison’s responses so obscured the process that there was no conceivable next step for Mr. Reid to take. First, the grievance officer’s memorаndum gave him conflicting messages—that there was “[n]o justification for further consideration” of his issue and that the issue had been “submitted to Internal Affairs for review.”12 Yet Mr. Reid “err[ed] on the side of exhaustion”—as required of a prisoner who receives an ambiguous response to his grievance—and appealed that memorandum to the Administrative Review Board. Ross, 136 S. Ct. at 1859.
When he did so, the Board’s response further obscured the next steps Mr. Reid was supposed to take. The Board told him that his appeal was missing specific documents but, like the Board in Williams, did not check the box specifying that those documents nеeded to be provided or that some explanation needed to be given for their absence. If, as Officer Balota contends, exhaustion required that Mr. Reid explain to the Board why certain documents were missing from his appeal, nothing in the record shows that Mr. Reid could have known about that requirement. See Williams, 957 F.3d at 833–34 (holding that an Illinois prisoner exhausted “all the steps the prison offer[ed]” when the Board returned the appeal as insufficient but did not check the box directing the prisoner to provide missing documents).
Officer Balota submits that Mr. Reid simply did not wait long enough for the warden to respond to his standard grievance. He relies on Ford v. Johnson, 362 F.3d 395, 400 (7th Cir. 2004), in which we ruled that a grievance procеss with a similar aspirational timeline—there, it was sixty days, “whenever possible”—does not necessarily trigger an inmate’s right to sue once that period had passed. Because the regulation governing Mr. Reid’s process,
However, unlike Ford, in which the inmate sued upon the passage of the “aspirational” deadline despite knowing that the prison was investigating his appeal, 362 F.3d at 400, Mr. Reid had no reason to believe that anyone was looking into his grievance. As we have already discussed, the responses from the Administrative Review Board suggested that no one was. In any case, Officer Balota cannot overcome the fact that no prison official ever responded with an answer to Mr. Reid’s standard grievance. See Dole, 438 F.3d at 809; see also Lewis v. Washington, 300 F.3d 829, 833 (7th Cir. 2002) (“[W]e refuse to interpret the PLRA ‘so narrowly as to … permit [prison officials] to exploit the exhaustion requirement through indefinite delay in responding to grievances.’”) (second and third alterations in original) (quoting Goodman v. Carter, 2001 WL 755137, at *3 (N.D. Ill. July 2, 2001)). Without that response, no further administrative avenue was opened to Mr. Reid.
Conclusion
The prison’s communications with Mr. Reid so obscured the administrative process that it became unknowable and, thus, unavailable to him. Therefore, having concluded that Mr. Reid satisfied the exhaustion requirement under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, we VACATE the judgment and REMAND for additional proceedings.
VACATED and REMANDED