Harris v. Garner

Citation216 F.3d 970
Decision Date27 June 2000
Docket NumberNo. 98-8899,98-8899
Parties(11th Cir. 2000) Frederick Lamar HARRIS, Danny Chadwick, et. al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Wayne GARNER, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections, A.G. Thomas, Director of Facilities Division of the Georgia Department of Corrections, et. al., Defendants-Appellees, United States of America, Intervenor-Appellee.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. (No.97-00079-5-CV-4-HL), Hugh Lawson, Judge.

Before ANDERSON, Chief Judge, and TJOFLAT, EDMONDSON, COX, BIRCH, DUBINA, BLACK, CARNES, BARKETT, HULL, MARCUS and WILSON, Circuit Judges.

CARNES, Circuit Judge:

In an effort to stem the flood of prisoner lawsuits in federal court, Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Pub.L. No. 104-134, 110 Stat. 1321 (1996) ("PLRA"). One of the provisions of the PLRA states that:

No Federal civil action may be brought by a prisoner confined in a jail, prison, or other correctional facility, for mental or emotional injury suffered while in custody without a prior showing of physical injury.

42 U.S.C. § 1997e(e). We granted rehearing en banc in this case to decide whether the provision applies to lawsuits that are filed while the plaintiff is a confined prisoner but which are not decided until after he is released from confinement. We hold it does.

I. BACKGROUND

The factual and legal background of this case is set forth in some detail in the panel opinion, Harris v. Garner, 190 F.3d 1279, vacated, reh'g granted en banc, 197 F.3d 1059 (11th Cir.1999), and we will not repeat it at length here. Suffice it to say that eleven inmates of a Georgia prison filed a lawsuit claiming that their federal constitutional rights had been violated during a prison "shakedown." All eleven of them were confined in the prison when the lawsuit was filed, but by the time the district court entered judgment fifteen-and-a-half months later six of the inmate plaintiffs had been released from confinement.1 The district court nonetheless applied section 1997e(e) to bar those six prisoners' claims for monetary relief, because they had not alleged the requisite physical injury.

A panel of this Court reversed the district court's judgment insofar as it applied section 1997e(e) to the monetary claims of those six plaintiffs, see Harris, 190 F.3d at 1284-85, but we granted rehearing en banc, see Harris, 197 F.3d 1059 (11th Cir.1999), which vacated the panel opinion. We now reinstate all of the panel opinion except for Part III A, which is the part that concerns this issue, and except for Part IV, the Conclusion, insofar as it relates to this issue. For the reasons that follow, we affirm the district court's judgment in part and vacate and remand it in part.

II. DISCUSSION
A. The Plain Language of the Statute

We begin our construction of section 1997e(e) where courts should always begin the process of legislative interpretation, and where they often should end it as well, which is with the words of the statutory provision. See United States v. Gilbert, 198 F.3d 1293, 1298 (11th Cir.1999) (citing United States v. Steele, 147 F.3d 1316, 1318 (11th Cir.1998) (en banc) ("In construing a statute we must begin, and often should end as well, with the language of the statute itself.") (citations omitted)); see also Connecticut Nat'l Bank v. Germain, 503 U.S. 249, 253-54, 112 S.Ct. 1146 1149, 117 L.Ed.2d 391 (1992) ("[I]n interpreting a statute a court should always turn first to one, cardinal canon before all others," which is "that courts must presume that a legislature says in a statute what it means and means in a statute what it says there;" and "[w]hen the words of a statute are unambiguous, then, this first canon is also the last: judicial inquiry is complete.") (citations and marks omitted).

Insofar as the issue before us is concerned, the operative language of section 1997e(e) is "No federal civil action may be brought by a prisoner confined ...," and the loadbearing word is "brought," a derivative of the verb "bring" in the third person singular, passive voice. The dispositive question is whether "bring" means to commence or start a lawsuit, or instead means to maintain or continue it to conclusion.2

The standard legal dictionary answers that question as follows: "To 'bring' an action or suit has a settled customary meaning at law, and refers to the initiation of legal proceedings in a suit." Black's Law Dictionary 192 (6th ed.1990); accord 5 Words and Phrases, "Begun" (1968) (defining "begun" or "brought" to mean "commenced"). That is the generally accepted meaning of the term, and this is not the first time we have had occasion to say so. In EEOC v. Eastern Airlines, Inc., 736 F.2d 635, 639 (11th Cir.1984), we were called upon to interpret section 7(c)(1) of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which provides that the right of any person "to bring" a private action under that statute terminates upon the commencement of an enforcement action by the EEOC. The defendant in the case argued that "to bring" means filing or continuing a lawsuit, so that once the EEOC starts an enforcement action, section 7(c)(1) bars a private plaintiff from continuing a previously filed lawsuit. See id. at 639. We rejected that position, agreeing instead with the Second Circuit's decision in Burns v. Equitable Life Assurance Soc. of the U.S., 696 F.2d 21, 23 (2d Cir.1982), that "the words 'to bring' mean only 'to commence,' rather than to 'commence or maintain.' " See EEOC, 736 F.3d at 639-40. The same is true here.

The Supreme Court has reached an identical conclusion about the meaning of "bring" and "brought." Hoffman v. Blaski, 363 U.S. 335, 341, 80 S.Ct. 1084, 1089, 4 L.Ed.2d 1254 (1960), involved 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), the venue provision which permits the transfer of "any civil action to any other district or division where it might have been brought." The argument was made that because the statute is remedial, the words " 'where it might have been brought' should be held to relate not only to the time of the bringing of the action, but also to the time of the transfer." See id. at 342, 80 S.Ct. at 1089. The Supreme Court rejected that position, in large part because the statutory language was "unambiguous, direct [and] clear," id. at 343, 80 S.Ct. at 1089, and interpreting "might have been brought" to refer to anything other than the time the lawsuit was filed would "do violence to the plain words" of the statute. Id. at 344, 80 S.Ct. at 1090. The same is true here.

This is not new ground. The Supreme Court first broke it one hundred and seventeen years ago, when it had occasion to apply a legislative requirement that a lawsuit be "brought within 90 days after the decision" of a government official. The Court said this:

A suit is brought when in law it is commenced, and we see no significance in the fact that in the legislation of congress on the subject of limitations the word "commenced" is sometimes used, and at other times the word "brought." In this connection the two words evidently mean the same thing, and are used interchangeably.

Goldenberg v. Murphy, 108 U.S. 162, 163, 2 S.Ct. 388, 389, 27 L.Ed. 686 (1883). The same is true here: "brought" means "commenced."

The decisions we have laid out show that for more than a century before the enactment of the PLRA, it was well established that "brought" and "bring" refer to the filing or commencement of a lawsuit, not to its continuation. This long history of established meaning is important, because we readily presume that Congress knows the settled legal definition of the words it uses, and uses them in the settled sense. See Commissioner v. Keystone Consol. Industries, Inc., 508 U.S. 152, 159, 113 S.Ct. 2006, 2011-12, 124 L.Ed.2d 71 (1993) (explaining that Congress is presumed to be aware of settled judicial and administrative interpretations of words when it writes them into a statute); Alabama v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 636 F.2d 1061, 1065 (5th Cir.1981) ("When a word has a judicially settled meaning, it is presumed that Congress, by using that word in a statute, used it in that accepted sense.") (citation omitted).

The meaning that we give section 1997e(e)'s "may be brought"-the plain and ordinary meaning of the words-is also mandated by our recent decision about the meaning of "shall be brought" as that phrase is used in another section of the same legislation. Congress included in the PLRA an administrative exhaustion requirement which provides that "No action shall be brought with respect to prison conditions ... until such administrative remedies as are available are exhausted." 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a) (emphasis added). In Miller v. Tanner, 196 F.3d 1190, 1193 (11th Cir.1999), we interpreted the word "brought" in section 1997e(a) to mean the filing of the lawsuit, holding: "An inmate incarcerated in a state prison, thus, must first comply with the grievance procedures established by the state department of corrections before filing a federal lawsuit under section 1983." (emphasis added). Indeed, the panel opinion in this case agrees with that interpretation. See Harris, 190 F.3d at 1286 (holding that the "brought" language in section 1997e(a) "means that a prisoner must exhaust all administrative remedies that are available before filing suit ....") (emphasis added).

The language we have quoted from the Miller decision establishes that "brought," as used in section 1997e(a)'s "No action shall be brought ..." language means filed. And the same word means the same thing in section 1997e(a)'s "No federal civil action shall be brought ..." language. See Atlantic Cleaners & Dyers v. United States, 286 U.S. 427, 433, 52 S.Ct. 607, 609, 76 L.Ed. 1204 (1932) ("[T]here is a natural presumption that identical words used in different parts of the same act are intended to have the same meaning."); Doctors Hosp., Inc. of...

To continue reading

Request your trial
852 cases
  • Magwood v. Beem, Case No. 4:14cv314-MW/CAS
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 11th Circuit. United States District Courts. 11th Circuit. Northern District of Florida
    • 27 Enero 2015
    ...for compensatory monetary damages must necessarily be limited to nominal damages as required by 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(e). Harris v. Garner, 216 F.3d 970 (11th Cir. 2000)18, reinstating in part 190 F.3d 1279 (11th Cir. 1999); Osterback v. Ingram, et al., No. 00-10558, 263 F.3d 169 (11th Cir. 200......
  • Alabama v. U.S. Dep't of Commerce
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 11th Circuit. Middle District of Alabama
    • 29 Junio 2021
    ...the words of the statutory provision." United States v. Hastie , 854 F.3d 1298, 1303 (11th Cir. 2017) (citing Harris v. Garner , 216 F.3d 970, 972 (11th Cir. 2000) (en banc)). Section 209 provides that "[a]ny person aggrieved by the use of any statistical method in violation of the Constitu......
  • Mineral Policy Center v. Norton, Civil Action 01-00073 (HHK) (D. D.C. 11/18/2003)
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. United States District Court (Columbia)
    • 18 Noviembre 2003
    ...to discern the statute's meaning."); United States v. Braxtonbrown-Smith, 278 F.3d 1348, 1352 (D.C. Cir. 2002); Harris v. Garner, 216 F.3d 970, 976 (11th Cir. 2000) (en banc), cert. denied, 532 U.S. 1065 (2001). Finally, even if the court were inclined to rely on FLPMA's legislative history......
  • Bio-med. Applications Of Ga. Inc v. City Of Dalton, Civil Action No. 4:08-CV-0134-HLM.
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 11th Circuit. United States District Courts. 11th Circuit. Northern District of Georgia
    • 13 Octubre 2009
    ...... Prior to 1981, Medicare generally acted. as the "primary" payer in situations where. there was double coverage for the Medicare recipient. Harris Corp. v. Humana. Health Ins. Co. of Fla., 253 F.3d 598, 600. (11th Cir.2001). In an attempt to reduce. the rising cost of Medicare, Congress. ...in the face of even arguably unambiguous statutory language. See Harris v. Garner, 216. F.3d 970, 977 (11th Cir.2000) ("Notwithstanding that well-recognized and bedrock. principle [that there is no need to consult. legislative ......
  • Request a trial to view additional results
3 books & journal articles
  • Leased Access: Has the Cable Television Carriage Requirement Become Unconstitutional?
    • United States
    • Federal Communications Law Journal Vol. 74 No. 1, January 2022
    • 1 Enero 2022
    ...https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/10730170728787 [https://perma.cc/47LA-AYCH]. (186.) Stogner, supra note 181. (187.) See Harris v. Garner, 216 F.3d 970, 976 (11th Cir. 2000) ("[T]he role of the judicial branch is to apply statutory language, not to rewrite it." (citing Badaracco v. Comm'r, 4......
  • MAKING MARIJUANA LESS ILLEGAL: CHALLENGES FOR NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES ENTERING THE MARIJUANA MARKET.
    • United States
    • South Dakota Law Review Vol. 67 No. 3, September 2022
    • 22 Septiembre 2022
    ...used their ordinary meaning.'"); CBS Inc. v. Prince Time 24 Joint Venture, 245 F.3d 1217, 1222 (11th Cir. 2001) (quoting Harris v. Garner, 216 F.3d 970, 976 (11th Cir. 2000)) ("We have also said just as frequently that 'when the import of words Congress has used is clear... we need not reso......
  • Bringing transparency and accountability to criminal justice institutions in the South.
    • United States
    • Stanford Law & Policy Review Vol. 22 No. 2, March 2011
    • 22 Marzo 2011
    ...for mental or emotional injury suffered while in custody without a prior showing of physical injury."). (137.) See Harris v. Garner, 216 F.3d 970 (11th Cir. 2000) (en (138.) See Harris v. Garner, 190 F.3d 1279, 1282 (11th Cir. 1999), vacated, 197 F.3d 1059 (11th Cir. 1999), reinstated in pa......

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT