Background
Lawrence Gregory Burns, then a pretrial detainee at the Milwaukee County Jail, experienced chest pain, shortness of breath, weakness, and vision problems on December 24, 2021. He alleged that corrections officers Sterling Polk and John Proeber failed to answer his call for help, tell him his COVID-19 test result, or check on him as his condition worsened. Burns eventually lost consciousness, was transported to a hospital, and tested positive for COVID-19.
Burns filed a jail grievance about the officers’ alleged failure to respond. Jail staff later answered and closed it. After Burns sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for inadequate medical attention, the officers moved for summary judgment based on his failure to appeal the grievance. Burns submitted a sworn declaration stating that the grievance had not been forwarded to the proper designee and that no appeal was made available to him. The district court treated his statement as a misunderstanding of the grievance procedure, granted summary judgment to the officers, and dismissed the claims without holding an evidentiary hearing.
The Court’s Holding
The Seventh Circuit held that Burns raised a genuine dispute of material fact over whether the jail’s grievance-appeal process was actually available to him. Although the jail handbook described an appeal procedure, a process that exists on paper may still be unavailable in practice. Burns’s sworn declaration was evidence that he could not access the appeal process, while the officers presented contrary evidence that the process was available and operating.
The district court improperly resolved that factual conflict at summary judgment by inferring that Burns merely misunderstood the procedure. Because courts may not weigh evidence, assess credibility, or choose among competing inferences at that stage, the Seventh Circuit vacated the judgment and remanded. It left the district court to decide initially whether the exhaustion dispute is intertwined with the merits and therefore must be tried to a jury under Perttu v. Richards, or whether a judge may resolve it through a Pavey evidentiary hearing.
Key Takeaways
- Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, incarcerated plaintiffs must exhaust only administrative remedies that were actually available to them.
- A written grievance policy does not establish availability as a matter of law when sworn evidence indicates that officials prevented access to the appeal process.
- A factual conflict over access to grievance procedures cannot be resolved through credibility findings or adverse inferences at summary judgment.
Why It Matters
The decision underscores that defendants asserting nonexhaustion must establish both that a prisoner failed to complete the required process and that the process was genuinely usable. Courts cannot dispose of a prisoner’s claim merely because official materials describe an appeal mechanism when record evidence disputes whether that mechanism could be accessed in practice.
On remand, the district court must also account for the Supreme Court’s distinction between exhaustion disputes that may be decided by a judge and those intertwined with the merits of a Seventh Amendment claim, which must be resolved by a jury.