Charlie Hardin v. Officer Hunt

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
• Decided: June 13, 2023
• Docket: 21-7195
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

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UNPUBLISHED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.

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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.

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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Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.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