Alejo v. Heller

• Decision Date: 13 May 2003
• Docket Number: No. 01-1573.,01-1573.
• Citation: 328 F.3d 930
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit
• Parties: Urbano C. ALEJO, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gary E. HELLER and Keith Heckler,<SMALL><SUP>1</SUP></SMALL> Defendants-Appellees.

328 F.3d 930

Urbano C. ALEJO, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gary E. HELLER and Keith Heckler,¹ Defendants-Appellees.

No. 01-1573.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued February 19, 2003.

Decided May 13, 2003.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Erik F. Dyhrkopp, Kara A. Elgersma (argued), Bell, Boyd & Lloyd, Chicago, IL, for plaintiff-appellant.

James M. Hipkiss (argued), Office of the U.S. Attorney, Civil Division, Fairview Heights, IL, for defendants-appellees.

Before FLAUM, Chief Judge, COFFEY and KANNE, Circuit Judges.

KANNE, Circuit Judge.

Prisoner-detainee Urbano C. Alejo was disciplined for failing to obey a federal correction officer's order that was issued in English. Alejo, a Spanish-speaking Cuban national, brought this Bivens-style action, alleging various denials of due process based on his nationality and ethnicity. All but one of these claims — that Alejo was unconstitutionally disciplined for his failure to obey an order he could not understand — were dismissed for want of prosecution, a ruling that is not challenged here. What is challenged is (i) the district court's sua sponte dismissal without prejudice, at the threshold stage, of all but one of the prison-personnel defendants on account of Alejo's failure to allege their personal involvement, and (ii) the district court's subsequent dismissal of the remaining claim against defendant Lieutenant Gary Heller, because that claim necessarily asserted the invalidity of a disciplinary determination that had not previously been challenged. We affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand for proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I. HISTORY

Alejo's Background

Alejo fled Cuba for the United States in 1980. Shortly after his arrival, the Immigration and Naturalization Service detained him and placed him in federal custody. Three years later, while in detention, Alejo was convicted and sentenced for conveying a weapon at a federal facility. Thereafter, in 1986, Alejo was convicted and sentenced for killing his cellmate.

During his sentence for murder, Alejo served time at various federal prisons, including the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois ("USP Marion"), where the events giving rise to this action occurred. Alejo has completed his criminal sentence, but remains confined as an INS detainee.

The Incident

While at USP Marion, Alejo was housed in the prison's "B Unit" and was placed in the prison's "pretransfer" program, a unit and program designated for those prisoners and detainees who had maintained "clear conduct" during their recent history of incarceration and as a reward received special privileges, such as relaxed rules and the ability to work at a cable factory. As a condition for receiving these privileges, however, B-Unit inmates were subject to random strip searches.

In the afternoon of August 12, 1994, Alejo was stopped as he was leaving the dinner hall by USP Correction Officer Keith Heckler and ordered to strip. Alejo complied. Heckler then ordered Alejo in English to hand Heckler his clothes as he removed them. Heckler contends that Alejo refused this order, placing his clothes instead on a nearby wooden bench and telling Heckler also in English to pick them up himself.

Alejo denies this, and contends that although he understood Heckler's order to strip — having complied with such orders on occasions too numerous to list — he did not understand what Heckler was ordering him to do with his discarded clothes. It is undisputed that Alejo has difficulty understanding English. In fact, this was apparently known to prison officials at the time of the strip-search incident. A November 1993 prisoner report on Alejo described the extent of his grasp of the English language: "Caberra-Alejo does not speak English in any substantial manner and effective communication is only accomplished by use of an interpreter."

Nonetheless, Heckler reported Alejo's noncompliance to his superior, USP Lieutenant Gary Heller. Heller instructed Heckler to write him up for refusal to obey an order. Heckler did so, and after another lieutenant conducted a short investigation into the incident, which revealed Alejo's defense that he had not understood the order, the report was referred to the prison disciplinary committee.

Three days later, the disciplinary committee convened to consider the incident report and determined that Alejo had willfully disobeyed Heckler's order. As a result, Alejo was removed from the B Unit and the pretransfer program.

On September 12, 1994, Alejo appealed the disciplinary-committee decision to the prison warden, who denied relief. Alejo then submitted an administrative appeal of the warden's decision to the regional director. But that appeal did not challenge the disciplinary committee's decision regarding the strip-search incident; instead, it challenged an unrelated disciplinary determination arising from a separate incident involving Alejo's possession of a razor blade, which had resulted in Alejo being placed in disciplinary segregation.

The Lawsuit

Rather than further pursuing his administrative appeal of the strip-search incident, on September 14, 1994, Alejo initiated this action by filing a pro se complaint written entirely in Spanish. The district court struck the complaint for noncompliance with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a), granting Alejo leave to refile. On March 27, 1995, Alejo filed his amended pro se complaint, written in English.

The amended complaint named Heller and Heckler, as well as various other prison officials, as defendants. But in Alejo's statement of his claim, only Heller is referred to by name. He described the defendants as "Gary E. Heller, and other John Does of the Bureau of Prisons," and accused them of violating his constitutional rights by (i) harassing him on account of his Cuban ancestry and in retaliation for prior complaints about his custodial conditions, (ii) inflicting disproportionate punishment upon him also on account of his Cuban ancestry, and (iii) denying him Spanish-speaking interpreters when issuing orders and preventing him from meaningful access to the courts by refusing to address his administrative appeals written in Spanish.

On May 17, 1995, the district court granted Alejo permission to proceed in forma pauperis, but sua sponte dismissed Heckler and every other defendant except for Heller from the suit, finding that in his statement of claim, Alejo made no allegation that any of them were personally involved in the events giving rise to the suit. The dismissal regarding the other defendants was granted without prejudice, and the case against Heller was referred to a magistrate judge for further proceedings.

Heller moved for a more definite statement on July 24, 1995, a motion which the district court summarily denied a month later. On January 30, 1996, the district court appointed counsel for Alejo.

A year later, Heller filed a motion seeking dismissal or, alternatively, summary judgment on Alejo's claims, arguing that he was not personally involved in the events at issue and that even if he was, he did not violate any of Alejo's clearly established constitutional rights by advising Heckler to pursue disciplinary charges against Alejo and was therefore entitled to qualified immunity. Because Heller had relied on materials outside of the pleadings, the motion was treated as one for summary judgment.

In his report and recommendation issued June 17, 1997, the magistrate judge recommended rejection of Alejo's First Amendment access-to-the-courts claim and retention of the remaining claims. On August 19, 1997, the district court adopted the report and recommendation in full, granting summary judgment in favor of Heller on the access-to-the-courts claim and denying relief as to the balance of the claims.

For the next three years, the case meandered through discovery and pretrial motions. On July 14, 2000, Heller filed his second motion for summary judgment, claiming that because success on Alejo's claims arising out of the strip-search incident would necessarily invalidate the disciplinary determination resulting from that incident, he was precluded from collaterally seeking damages relief without having first invalidated that determination directly. Heller noted that Alejo had not exhausted his administrative remedies to expunge that incident report or the decision of the disciplinary committee. Heller also reasserted his lack-of-personal-involvement and qualified-immunity arguments. On August 7, 2000, Alejo filed his response to the motion.

The magistrate judge agreed with Heller's position that this Circuit's precedent interpreting the Supreme Court's holding in Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477, 114 S.Ct. 2364, 129 L.Ed.2d 383 (1994), required Alejo to invalidate the disciplinary determination before collaterally attacking it in a Bivens-style suit. On September 9, 2000, he recommended the complaint be dismissed. Alejo filed his objections to the magistrate judge's report and recommendation on September 25, 2000.

On November 13, 2000, the district judge adopted the report and recommendation and dismissed without prejudice Alejo's claims relating to the strip-search incident. The district judge recognized that in a decision issued August 11, 2000, we overruled our prior precedent applying Heck to prisoners who challenge only the conditions of their confinement, DeWalt v. Carter, 224 F.3d 607, 617-18 (7th Cir. 2000); however, he concluded that the invalidity of that prior precedent was "unrelated to the principles at issue in this case."

Further, the court ordered Alejo to show cause why it should not dismiss for want of prosecution any remaining claims that did not arise out of the strip-search incident. On February 22, 2001, the district court ruled on the show-cause order, finding that for several years Alejo had not mentioned any specific event other than the proceedings relating to the strip-search incident, and therefore ...