[PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
FILED
U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
JULY 26, 2005
No. 03-15636
THOMAS K. KAHN
CLERK
D. C. Docket No. 01-00283-CV-2-CAR-5
DAVID JOHNSON,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
versus
TYDUS MEADOWS, Warden, Bostick State Prison,
BOB BARRY, Warden of Care and Treatment, Bostick State Prison,
RICKY JACKSON, Warden of Security, Bostick State Prison,
Defendants-Appellants.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Middle District of Georgia
(July 26, 2005)
Before DUBINA and FAY, Circuit Judges, and GOLDBERG*, Judge.
______________________
*Honorable Richard W. Goldberg, Judge, United States Court of International Trade, sitting by
designation.
DUBINA, Circuit Judge:
In this interlocutory appeal, appellants Tydus Meadows, Warden of Bostick
State Prison (“Bostick”), Bob Barry, Warden of Care and Treatment at Bostick,
and Ricky Jackson, Warden of Security at Bostick (“the Bostick wardens”), appeal
the district court’s order denying their motion to dismiss appellee David Johnson’s
(“Johnson”) complaint pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). The issue presented on
appeal is whether the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s (“PLRA”), Pub.L. No. 104-
134, 110 Stat. 1321 (1996), exhaustion requirement requires a prisoner either to
meet timely the administrative deadlines or the good cause standard of Georgia’s
administrative grievance procedures before filing a federal claim. This issue is
one of first impression in our circuit and essentially asks what exhaustion requires
under the PLRA – simple exhaustion, or something more, such as “proper
exhaustion.” See Spruill v. Gillis, 372 F.3d 218, 228 (3rd Cir. 2004). The
question also implies whether there is a procedural default concept within the
PLRA’s exhaustion requirement. Because we conclude that an untimely
administrative grievance does not satisfy the exhaustion requirement of the PLRA,
we reverse the district court’s order and remand this case with directions that the
district court dismiss Johnson’s complaint.
2
I. BACKGROUND
Johnson, a Georgia state prisoner, originally filed a 42 U.S.C. § 1983
complaint with the district court on August 20, 1999, alleging exposure to
hazardous chemicals, harassment by prison officials, and retaliation from prison
officials. On February 20, 2001, the district court dismissed that complaint
without prejudice for failure to exhaust administrative remedies. Johnson filed an
out-of-time administrative grievance in order to satisfy the exhaustion
requirement, making similar allegations to those in his federal complaint. The
Corrections Department denied his grievance as untimely because the Georgia
Prison Inmate Grievance Procedure requires that all grievances be filed “within
five (5) calendar days from the date that the prisoner discovers, or reasonably
should have discovered, the incident giving rise to the complaint and was able to
file the grievance.” See Ga. Dept. of Corrections S.O.P. IIBOD-0001 (2001). At
the appeals level, the agency did not address Johnson’s grievance because he
untimely filed.
On July 18, 2001, following the denial of his appeal, Johnson filed another
federal complaint in which he reiterated his prior complaints and requested
monetary damages. The Bostick wardens filed a motion to dismiss pursuant to
Rule 12(b)(6), Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, arguing that Johnson’s complaint
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was barred by the statute of limitations because he filed his second federal
complaint over two years after the complained of conduct. They also invoked the
Eleventh Amendment. Johnson first responded that because he originally filed a
timely complaint in 1999, which was dismissed without prejudice in January 2001
to allow him the opportunity to exhaust his administrative remedies, his July 2001
complaint was not time-barred because the statute of limitations period was tolled
during his federal suit. Johnson also responded that the Bostick wardens did not
have immunity in their official capacities.
The magistrate judge issued a report and recommendation, recommending
that the district court grant the Bostick wardens’ motion to dismiss. The
magistrate judge determined that Johnson’s complaint was filed untimely because
the statute of limitations was not tolled during the pendency of Johnson’s initial
complaint and because he failed to show that an inequitable event prevented him
from timely filing his complaint. Johnson objected to the magistrate judge’s report
and moved for reconsideration. The magistrate judge vacated its report, finding
that there should have been an equitable tolling of the statute of limitations during
the time that Johnson attempted to exhaust by filing the out-of-time grievance after
the district court first dismissed his complaint.
4
The Bostick wardens filed a second motion to dismiss, arguing that
Johnson’s untimely use of prison grievance procedures meant that he had not
exhausted his administrative remedies, stripping the federal court of jurisdiction.
They also asserted that Johnson did not attempt to file a grievance before filing his
federal complaint and failed to show good cause when filing his untimely
grievance. The magistrate judge recommended granting the second motion to
dismiss because Johnson never sought permission to file an out-of-time grievance,
but the magistrate judge recommended that the dismissal be without prejudice to
permit Johnson a final opportunity to file an out-of-time grievance. Johnson
objected through an amended response and a motion for reconsideration. The
magistrate judge again entered an order vacating the report and recommendation.
The magistrate judge subsequently entered a new report and recommendation,
granting the Bostick wardens’ second motion to dismiss only to the extent that
they were being sued in their official capacities. The Bostick wardens objected,
claiming that the magistrate judge erred in concluding that Johnson had properly
exhausted his administrative remedies before filing suit.
The district court adopted the report and recommendation. The Bostick
wardens filed a motion for certification for interlocutory appeal on the following
issue: whether the failure of a plaintiff to grieve timely requires a dismissal of a
5
federal suit with prejudice, when the prisoner did not follow internal grievance
procedure initially, and upon a subsequent filing of an out-of-time grievance, the
prison administrators find no grounds (or good cause) to authorize said out-of-
time grievance. The district court granted the motion, and this court granted
permission for the Bostick wardens’ interlocutory appeal pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §
1292(b).
II. ISSUE
Whether the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement, codified in 42 U.S.C. §
1997e(a), requires prisoners to meet timely the deadlines or the good cause
standard of Georgia’s administrative grievance procedures before filing a federal
claim.
III. STANDARD OF REVIEW
This court reviews de novo a district court’s interpretation and application
of 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a)’s exhaustion requirement. Higginbottom v. Carter, 223
F.3d 1259, 1260 (11th Cir. 2000).
IV. DISCUSSION
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Section 1997e(a) provides that “[n]o action shall be brought with respect to
prison conditions under section 1983 of this title, 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).
The PLRA’s exhaustion requirement “applies to all inmate suits about prison life,
whether they involve general circumstances or particular episodes, and whether
they allege excessive force or some other wrong.” Porter v. Nussle, 534 U.S. 516,
532, 122 S. Ct. 983, 992 (2002). This provision entirely eliminates judicial
discretion and instead mandates strict exhaustion, “irrespective of the forms of
relief sought and offered through administrative avenues.” Booth v. Churner, 532
U.S. 731, 741 n.6, 121 S. Ct. 1819, 1825 n.6 (2001). Congress intended to afford
prison officials time to address grievances internally before allowing a prisoner to
initiate a federal lawsuit. See Porter, 534 U.S. at 525, 122 S. Ct. at 988. Thus,
whatever the precise contours of what exhaustion requires, it plainly is procedural
in nature:
While the modifier “available” requires the possibility of some relief
for the action complained of . . . , the word “exhausted” has a
decidedly procedural emphasis. It makes sense only in referring to
the procedural means, not the particular relief ordered. . . . [O]ne
“exhausts” processes, not forms of relief, and the statute provides that
one must.
7
Booth, 532 U.S. at 738-39, 121 S. Ct. at 1824. “In other words, the modifier
‘available’ in the PLRA means that inmates must exhaust administrative remedies
so long as there is the possibility of at least some kind of relief.” Ross v. County
of Bernalillo, 365 F.3d 1181, 1187 (10th Cir. 2001).
Therefore, this court has noted that “when a state provides a grievance
procedure for its prisoners, as Georgia does here, an inmate alleging harm suffered
from prison conditions must file a grievance and exhaust the remedies available
under that procedure before pursuing a § 1983 lawsuit.” Brown v. Sikes, 212 F.3d
1205, 1207 (11th Cir. 2000). This court has described seven policy reasons for
favoring an exhaustion requirement:
(1) to avoid premature interruption of the administrative process; (2)
to let the agency develop the necessary factual background upon
which decisions should be based; (3) to permit the agency to exercise
its discretion or apply its expertise; (4) to improve the efficiency of
the administrative process; (5) to conserve scarce judicial resources,
since the complaining party may be successful in vindicating rights in
the administrative process and the courts may never have to
intervene; (6) to give the agency a chance to discover and correct its
own errors; and (7) to avoid the possibility that frequent and
deliberate flouting of the administrative processes could weaken the
effectiveness of an agency by encouraging people to ignore its
procedures.
Alexander v. Hawk, 159 F.3d 1321, 1327 (11th Cir. 1998) (internal quotations
omitted).
8
Mindful of these policies favoring exhaustion, we look to our circuit
precedent and our sister circuits’ precedent to decide whether an untimely
grievance satisfies the exhaustion requirement of the PLRA. Although not directly
on point, Harper v. Jenkin, 179 F.3d 1311 (11th Cir. 1999), is persuasive. In
Harper, the prisoner filed an administrative grievance alleging that prison officials
violated his rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments by refusing him
needed medical treatment. Id. at 1312. The Georgia prison officials denied his
grievance because it was untimely. Id. The prisoner could have appealed the
officials’ denial of his grievance, but he acknowledged that the appeal would not
be heard because his grievance was untimely. Id. Therefore, the prisoner argued
that he had exhausted his administrative remedies. Id. We disagreed, noting, as
did the district court, that the Georgia State Prison Inmate Grievance Procedure
“allows the grievance coordinator to waive the time period for filing a grievance if
‘good cause’ is shown.” Id. at 1312. “Since [the prisoner] has not sought leave to
file an out-of-time grievance, he cannot be considered to have exhausted his
administrative remedies.” Id. We noted that “[i]f we were to accept [the
prisoner’s] position – that the filing of an untimely grievance exhausts an inmate’s
administrative remedies – inmates, such as [the prisoner], could ignore the
PLRA’s exhaustion requirement and still gain access to federal court merely by
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filing an untimely grievance.” Id. Therefore, we affirmed the district court’s order
of dismissal.1
Because we have not directly addressed the issue of whether an untimely
grievance that is rejected as such by prison officials can satisfy the exhaustion
requirement of § 1997(e)a, we look to our sister circuits that have considered the
issue. We agree with those circuits that have concluded that an untimely
grievance does not satisfy the exhaustion requirement of the PLRA. In a pre-
PLRA case, the Fifth Circuit upheld the dismissal of a prisoner’s § 1983 suit for
failure to exhaust administrative remedies where the inmate’s administrative
grievance had been dismissed as untimely filed. Marsh v. Jones, 53 F.3d 707, 710
(5th Cir. 1995). In so deciding, the court reasoned that “[w]ithout the prospect of
a dismissal with prejudice, a prisoner could evade the exhaustion requirement by
filing no administrative grievance or by intentionally filing an untimely one,
thereby foreclosing administrative remedies and gaining access to a federal forum
without exhausting administrative remedies.” Id.
1
We acknowledge that our discussion in Harper on whether an untimely grievance can
ever serve as a basis for exhaustion under the PLRA is dicta. However, the case has been
construed as supporting the application of a procedural default rule in the PLRA context. See
generally Pozo v. McCaughtry, 286 F.3d 1022, 1024 (7th Cir. 2002); Kermit Roosevelt III,
Exhaustion Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act: The Consequence of Procedural Error, 52
Emory L.J. 1771, 1782 n.65 (2003) (citing Harper as an example of a decision “hint[ing] that a
procedural error could create an incurable failure to exhaust”).
10
In a case under the PLRA, the Third Circuit found that “Congress’s policy
objectives will be served by interpreting § 1997e(a)’s exhaustion requirement to
include a procedural default component.” Spruill, 372 F.3d at 230. Relying on its
discussion of the PLRA’s legislative history, the court noted three Congressional
objectives relevant to its inquiry: “(1) to return control of the inmate grievance
process to prison administrators; (2) to encourage development of an
administrative record, and perhaps settlements, within the inmate grievance
process; and (3) to reduce the burden on the federal courts by erecting barriers to
frivolous prisoner lawsuits.” Id. The court found that “[a]ll three goals are
obviously served by a procedural default rule because such a rule prevents an end-
run around the exhaustion requirement, and thereby creates an overwhelming
incentive for a prisoner to pursue his claims to the fullest within the
administrative grievance system.” Id.
Additionally, in Ross, 365 F.3d at 1186, the Tenth Circuit found that the
PLRA’s exhaustion requirement contains a procedural default rule. The court
noted that in the habeas context, the purposes of the exhaustion requirement
“would be utterly defeated if the prisoner were able to obtain habeas review
simply by letting the time run so that state remedies were no longer available.” Id.
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at 1185-86 (quotation omitted). Reasoning that this same policy applies in the
PLRA context, the court noted that:
[A]llowing prisoners to proceed to federal court simply because they
have filed a time-barred grievance would frustrate the PLRA’s intent
to give prison officials the opportunity to take corrective action that
may satisfy inmates and reduce the need for litigation, to filter out
frivolous claims, and to create an administrative record that would
facilitate subsequent judicial review.
Id. at 1186. The court found that “[a] prison procedure that is procedurally barred
and thus is unavailable to a prisoner is not thereby considered exhausted.” Id.
“Regardless of whether a prisoner goes through the formality of submitting a time-
barred grievance, he may not successfully argue that he had exhausted his
administrative remedies by, in essence, failing to employ them.” Id. (quotation
and citation omitted).
Furthermore, in Pozo v. McCaughtry, 286 F.3d 1022, 1023 (7th Cir. 2002),
the Seventh Circuit held that “unless the prisoner completes the administrative
process by following the rules the state has established for that process, exhaustion
has not occurred.” The court found that “[a]ny other approach would allow a
prisoner to ‘exhaust’ state remedies by spurning them, which would defeat the
statutory objective of requiring the prisoner to give the prison administration an
opportunity to fix the problem.” Id. at 1023-24. Acknowledging a merger in the
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collateral attack and administrative law understandings of exhaustion, the court
found that exhaustion under 1997e(a) is administrative only. Id. at 1024. Hence,
“a prisoner who uses all administrative options that the state offers need not also
pursue judicial review in state court; but a prisoner who does not properly take
each step within the administrative process has failed to exhaust state remedies,
and thus is foreclosed by § 1997e(a) from litigating.” Id. The court concluded
that “[t]o exhaust remedies, a prisoner must file complaints and appeals in the
place, and at the time, the prison’s administrative rules require.” Id. at 1025. To
hold otherwise, the court stated, “would leave § 1997e(a) without any oomph.” Id.
See also Giano v. Goord, 380 F.3d 670, 677 (2d Cir. 2004) (acknowledging that a
rule allowing prisoners to circumvent the exhaustion requirement simply by
waiting to bring a § 1983 action until their administrative complaints are time-
barred would not comport with the purposes of the PLRA). But see Ngo v.
Woodford, 403 F.3d 620, 631 (9th Cir. 2005) (holding that an untimely
administrative appeal suffices to exhaust administrative remedies); Thomas v.
Woolum, 337 F.3d 720, 723 (6th Cir. 2003) (holding that “so long as an inmate
presents his or her grievance to prison officials and appeals through the available
procedures, the inmate has exhausted his or her administrative remedies, and a
13
prison’s decision not to address the grievance because it was untimely under
prison rules shall not bar the federal suit”).2
In addition to our sister circuits’ analyses and conclusions, we consider the
practical implications of imposing a procedural default component to the PLRA
exhaustion requirement. Importantly, we note that Johnson’s untimely
administrative grievance in this case does not comport with the intent of Congress
that prison officials have an opportunity to address the grievance internally and
rule on the grievance before the inmate files a complaint in federal court. This is
especially so in this case because Johnson did not request leave to file an untimely
2
In a well-reasoned dissent, Judge Rosen considered the exhaustion requirement in the
PLRA in the context of Supreme Court precedent interpreting the habeas statute. Thomas, 337
F.3d at 745-46. Judge Rosen specifically discussed Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 111 S.
Ct. 2546 (1991), which held that a prisoner’s untimely filing in state court barred him from
seeking habeas relief in federal court. Id. at 745. Judge Rosen stated that the import of Coleman
to the question presented seemed clear.
In that case, [Coleman v. Thompson,] a filing three days past a state court deadline
led the Supreme Court to hold that a death row prisoner had forfeited his
opportunity to obtain federal court review of the constitutionality of his continued
detention and sentence. The only relevant statutory prerequisite to such habeas
relief was that the prisoner must have exhausted the remedies available to him in
the state courts. It readily follows, in my view, that a filing past an administrative
deadline presumptively precludes an inmate from establishing the nearly identical
statutory prerequisite for commencement of a § 1983 suit. At a minimum,
Coleman blunts the force of the . . . contention that a requirement of timely filing
would impose too high a cost upon the constitutional rights of prisoners – the
stakes obviously were much higher in Coleman, implicating the prisoner’s
asserted right to be free from confinement and an eventual death sentence.
Id. at 746 (Rosen, J., dissenting in part and concurring in the judgment).
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administrative grievance and did not assert good cause for his failure to file a
timely grievance before he filed his federal complaint. Moreover, none of the
aims of § 1997e(a) has been achieved here because prison officials did not review
the merits of Johnson’s complaint – his grievance did not spur the corrective
action that might have obviated the need for litigation, there was no filtering of
potential frivolous claims, and no development of an administrative record to
assist the courts in deciding the controversy. See Porter, 534 U.S. at 525, 122 S.
Ct. at 988.3 Allowing Johnson’s untimely grievance to meet the exhaustion
requirement would run counter to the understanding that § 1997e(a) requires
prisoners to invoke and fully exhaust all available administrative grievance
processes. See generally Booth, 532 U.S. at 741 n.6, 121 S. Ct. at 1825 n.6.
V. CONCLUSION
For the foregoing reasons, we hold that the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement
does contain a procedural default component: Prisoners must timely meet the
deadlines or the good cause standard of Georgia’s administrative grievance
procedures before filing a federal claim. Therefore, Johnson’s grievance, which
3
As the Spruill Court acknowledged, there are subtler benefits to invoking a procedural
default rule in the PLRA exhaustion context: (1) it “enhances the integrity of prison
administration” and (2) it “reduces caseloads.” Spruill, 372 F.3d at 230.
15
he filed out-of-time and without good cause, is not sufficient to exhaust his
administrative remedies for purposes of the PLRA exhaustion requirement.
Accordingly, we reverse the district court’s order and remand the case with
directions that the district court dismiss Johnson’s action for failure to exhaust
administrative remedies.
REVERSED and REMANDED.
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