Horace Crump v. Jane Blue

121 F.4th 1108
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedNovember 15, 2024
Docket24-1126
StatusPublished
Cited by25 cases

This text of 121 F.4th 1108 (Horace Crump v. Jane Blue) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Horace Crump v. Jane Blue, 121 F.4th 1108 (6th Cir. 2024).

Opinion

RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b) File Name: 24a0255p.06

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

┐ HORACE W. CRUMP, JR., │ Plaintiff-Appellant, │ │ v. > No. 24-1126 │ │ JANE BLUE, LCF Nurse, NATHAN MIKEL, LCF Health │ Unit Manager (HUM), TIMOTHY SHAW, LCF Resident │ Unit Manager (RUM), and SUZANNE E. GROFF, LCF │ Nurse Practitioner (NP), in their personal capacities, │ Defendants-Appellees. │ ┘

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan at Grand Rapids. No. 1:23-cv-01353—Sally Berens, Magistrate Judge.

Argued: October 29, 2024

Decided and Filed: November 15, 2024

Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; READLER and BLOOMEKATZ, Circuit Judges. _________________

COUNSEL

ARGUED: Logan L. Page, WILKINSON STEKLOFF LLP, Washington, D.C., for Appellant. ON BRIEF: Logan L. Page, Dhruti Patel, WILKINSON STEKLOFF LLP, Washington, D.C., for Appellant.

SUTTON, C.J., delivered the opinion of the court in which READLER and BLOOMEKATZ, JJ., joined. READLER, J. (pp. 10–12), delivered a separate concurring opinion. No. 24-1126 Crump v. Blue, et al. Page 2

_________________

OPINION _________________

SUTTON, Chief Judge. While incarcerated at the Lakeland Correctional Facility in Michigan, Horace Crump filed this § 1983 action against several prison employees, alleging that they withheld treatment for his multiple sclerosis. At stake at this stage in the case is not whether the prison employees withheld this medical treatment; it is whether Crump’s lawsuit may go forward before he pays the required filing fee. The district court held that it could not. We vacate and remand.

I.

Anyone who files a lawsuit in federal court presumptively must pay a filing fee. See 28 U.S.C. § 1914(a). And anyone who cannot pay the fee may ask to proceed “in forma pauperis,” a status that allows the litigant to pay the fee over time or sometimes not at all. See id. § 1915(a)–(b). Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, prisoners may lose this privilege. They must pay the fee upfront if courts have dismissed three or more of their prior “action[s] or appeal[s]” as “frivolous, malicious, or [for] fail[ing] to state a claim.” Id. § 1915(g). Prisoners “under imminent danger of serious physical injury” are exempt from this three-strikes rule. Id.

When Crump filed his lawsuit, he did not pay his filing fee and instead sought leave to proceed in forma pauperis. The district court held that the Act’s three-strikes rule disqualified him from obtaining relief under this exception and dismissed his complaint. Crump appeals, disputing two of the three strikes.

II.

To bring the issue into view, it helps to describe Crump’s prior cases at the outset. In one of them, the district court dismissed Crump’s federal claims for failure to state a claim and declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over his state-law claims. Crump v. Patrick et al., No. 1:11-cv-15 (W.D. Mich. Feb. 18, 2011). In the other case, the court dismissed Crump’s claims against some defendants for failure to state a claim and declined to review the claims No. 24-1126 Crump v. Blue, et al. Page 3

against one defendant due to the Eleventh Amendment. Crump v. Armstrong et al., No. 2:11-cv- 45 (W.D. Mich. Sept. 27, 2013). In each of these mixed-claim cases, Crump’s complaint was dismissed in part for grounds not expressly listed in the Act’s three-strikes rule.

That backdrop tees up this question: When, if ever, do mixed-claim actions, those involving claims covered by the Act and claims not covered by the Act, count as strikes under the Prison Litigation Reform Act?

The language of the Act offers an initial clue. It states that a prisoner may not “bring a civil action or appeal a judgment” in forma pauperis if the prisoner has three or more times “brought an action or appeal in a court of the United States that was dismissed on the grounds that it is frivolous, malicious, or fails to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.” 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g). The Act, notably, refers to “action[s] or appeal[s],” not claims, when it mentions what counts as a strike. See id. “Action” ordinarily means the entire case containing one or multiple claims. See, e.g., Fed. R. Civ. P. 54(b) (“When an action presents more than one claim for relief . . . .”). This language suggests that all claims in a complaint, not just some of them, must be dismissed on grounds listed in the Act for the dismissal to count as a strike.

Congress’s use of “action” elsewhere in the Act supports this reading. When it uses “action” in other places in the Act, it does so in a way that refers to a lawsuit or proceeding, not individual claims. See, e.g., 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(2) (“A prisoner seeking to bring a civil action or appeal a judgment in a civil action . . . .”); id. § 1915(b)(1) (“[I]f a prisoner brings a civil action or files an appeal in forma pauperis . . . .”); id. § 1915(f)(1) (“Judgment may be rendered for costs at the conclusion of the suit or action as in other proceedings . . . .”). Congress usually gives the same word the same meaning throughout a single act. See Cochise Consultancy, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Hunt, 587 U.S. 262, 268 (2019). That unrebutted inference indicates that “action” does not refer to individual claims.

In the Act, Congress also showed that it knew how to refer separately to claims when it wished. See, e.g., 28 U.S.C. § 1915A(b) (“[T]he court shall identify cognizable claims or dismiss the complaint, or any portion of the complaint, if the complaint . . . .”). Its decision not to do so in the three-strikes provision is telling. The omission suggests that an “action” refers to No. 24-1126 Crump v. Blue, et al. Page 4

a case, not a claim within it—that an “action,” in other words, is “dismissed on the grounds that it is frivolous, malicious, or fails to state a claim” only when all of its claims are dismissed on those grounds. Id. § 1915(g).

This reading also comes with the comfort of common sense. Imagine if some claims in an action were dismissed for failure to state a claim, and others proceeded to succeed on the merits. It would be strange to attribute a failure-to-state-a-claim strike to an inmate who won the action’s war if not its every battle. See Thompson v. DEA, 492 F.3d 428, 432 (D.C. Cir. 2007).

Nearly all of our sister circuits interpret the Act in this way. Take the Second Circuit: “We therefore hold, consistent with our sister circuits and the plain language of § 1915(g), that a prisoner’s entire ‘action or appeal’ must be dismissed on a § 1915(g) ground to count as a strike under the PLRA.” Escalera v. Samaritan Vill., 938 F.3d 380, 382 (2d Cir. 2019) (per curiam). And the Third Circuit: “[T]he plain text of § 1915(g) precludes [the] view that a mixed dismissal is a strike. That is because a mixed dismissal is not a dismissal of the action on one or more of the three enumerated grounds.” Talley v. Wetzel, 15 F.4th 275, 280 (3d Cir. 2021). And the Fourth Circuit: “[W]e conclude that ‘action’ in § 1915(g) unambiguously means an entire case or suit.

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