Hoeft v. Straub

497 F. App'x 615
Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit·Decided November 30, 2012·No. No. 11-2349·Published·Cited by 1 cases

Opinion

ORDER

Mary Jo Hoeft claims that a doctor and nurse at the jail in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, withheld adequate medical care during her confinement in 2007. She sued the county, the sheriff, and the two medical professionals under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants, but instead of filing a timely notice of appeal or motion for reconsideration, Hoeft filed two motions that the district court construed as motions to vacate under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) and denied. Hoeft filed a notice of appeal, and in her brief she challenges the underlying dismissal rather than the adverse ruling on her post-judgment motions. We conclude that her challenge to the grant of summary judgment is untimely.

During her four months at the jail, Hoeft suffered from methicillin-resistant Staphilococcus aureus infections, commonly called MRSA infections, which were not properly diagnosed and treated until after she had been transferred to state prison. The district court understood Hoeft to be claiming that the nurse had been deliberately indifferent to her condition, and that the jail physician and sheriff had failed to train the nurse adequately and adopted a policy of denying efficacious treatment for inmates with MRSA infections. After discovery the defendants moved for summary judgment, which the district court granted. The court reasoned that the evidence at summary judgment established, at most, only that the nurse had been negligent in failing to diagnose and treat Hoeft’s infections. There was no evidence, the court continued, of a policy to ignore prisoners afflicted with MRSA infections. Moreover, the court added, Hoeft had abandoned her claim concerning the training given the nurse and other medical staff because she did not argue that point in [617] opposing the motion for summary judgment.

That decision was entered on March 7, 2011. Thirty-five days later, on April 11, Hoeft filed with the district what she had captioned as a motion for reconsideration. Two weeks later, after the defendants had challenged her motion as untimely, Hoeft filed another postjudgment motion, this time relying on Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) but incorporating by reference the entirety of her earlier submission. The district court recognized that Hoeft had missed the 28-day deadline for Rule 59 motions, see Fed.R.Civ.P. 59(e), and thus construed both submissions as motions under Rule 60(b), see Kiswani v. Phoenix Sec. Agency, Inc., 584 F.3d 741, 742-43 (7th Cir.2009). The court denied those motions on the ground that Hoeft’s arguments, most of which repeat what she had said in opposing the defendants’ motions for summary judgment, were not valid bases for setting aside the judgment.

A couple of weeks after that ruling, but more than three months after judgment had been entered, Hoeft filed a notice of appeal. She acknowledges that this notice of appeal, although meeting the 30-day deadline for challenging the Rule 60(b) decision, was filed too late to contest the underlying judgment. See Fed. R.App. P. 4(a)(1)(A). She argues, however, that a letter she wrote to the district court within the deadline for appealing the grant of summary judgment satisfies the requirements of a notice of appeal. That letter asked for an extension of time to object to the defendants’ bills of costs, and also noted that Hoeft was “preparing to file an appeal in this matter.”

A notice of appeal must specify the party taking the appeal, the order being appealed, and the court to which the party is appealing. Fed. R.App. P. 3(c)(1); Smith v. Barry, 502 U.S. 244, 247-48, 112 S.Ct. 678, 116 L.Ed.2d 678 (1992); United States v. Segal, 432 F.3d 767, 772 (7th Cir.2005). We construe a notice of appeal liberally and will overlook technical deficiencies, but we cannot excuse true noncompliance with Rule 3. Barry, 502 U.S. at 248;, 112 S.Ct. 678 Smith v. Grams, 565 F.3d 1037, 1041-42 (7th Cir.2009).

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Hoeft v. Straub, 497 F. App'x 615 (7th Cir. 2012).

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