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| PA Attorney General's Office Wins U.S. Supreme Court Case; Creates National Precedent in Prison Case |
| By PRNewswire |
| Published: 05/31/2001 |
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The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the 1996 federal Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) requires inmates to exhaust the administrative grievance process at their prisons before filing federal lawsuits. First Deputy Attorney General Jerry Pappert argued the precedent-setting case on behalf of state prison officials. 'This important ruling will ensure that inmates use the grievance process in their prisons and should prevent many frivolous claims from clogging our court system,' said Attorney General Mike Fisher. A Pennsylvania inmate, Timothy Booth, in May 1997 filed a lawsuit against four corrections officials at the State Correctional Institution at Smithfield, Huntingdon County. The inmate alleged four incidents of mistreatment in his lawsuit, which was one of 13 lawsuits he had filed in the Middle District Court of Pennsylvania. In his handwritten filing, the inmate requested a transfer from the prison, a court-appointed lawyer, an injunction against the officials and $400,000 in damages. While Booth filed grievances with the prison, he did not pursue them through all available steps in the process. The District Court dismissed the lawsuit, citing the PLRA requirement that inmates must exhaust all administrative remedies at their prisons before filing lawsuits in federal court. Congress passed the PLRA in an attempt to reduce the number of prisoner lawsuits filed in federal court. In 1995, the year before Congress passed the PLRA, prisoners filed more than 40,000 federal lawsuits, most of which were deemed without merit. The District Court's decision was affirmed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a conflict among the circuits -- three circuits had held that the inmate must exhaust his prison grievance process irrespective of the remedies available, while three others concluded the inmate did not have to exhaust the process if it did not provide the relief he said he needed. In appealing the Third Circuit's decision, the inmate contended that he did not have to exhaust the prison's grievance process because it did not provide for an award of money damages. Pappert argued that the PLRA requires an inmate to exhaust all 'available' remedies before filing a lawsuit, even though it may not be the specific remedy the inmate is seeking. Such an interpretation of the statute, Pappert contended, gave prison officials the opportunity to address and possibly resolve prisoner complaints before they ended up in the courts. The Court agreed: 'Congress's imposition of an obviously broader exhaustion requirement makes it highly implausible that it meant to give prisoners a strong inducement to skip the administrative process simply by limiting prayers for relief to money damages not offered through administrative grievance mechanisms,' wrote Justice David Souter. |
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