Rhodes v. Robinson
| Decision Date | 08 September 2010 |
| Docket Number | No. 08-16363.,08-16363. |
| Citation | 621 F.3d 1002 |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
| Parties | Kavin Maurice RHODES, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. M. ROBINSON; Ron Blevins; Sara Malone; R & R Officer; R & R Sergeant; Ombudsman; C. Nelson; Correctional Officer; V. Pazo, Correctional Officer; B. Jones, Sergeant; Robertson, Sergeant; J. Tidwell, Correctional Officer; A. Lopez, Facility Captain; Huebner, Lieutenant, Defendants-Appellees. |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Kavin M. Rhodes, Kern Valley State Prison, Delano, CA, the plaintiff-appellant pro se.
John W. Riches II, Deputy Attorney General, Sacramento, CA for the defendants-appellees.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, Lawrence J. O'Neill, District Judge, Presiding. DC No. CV 02-5018.
Before DIARMUID F. O'SCANNLAIN, A. WALLACE TASHIMA, and CARLOS T. BEA, Circuit Judges.
The district court sua sponte dismissed claims thirteen through thirty-three of prisoner Kavin Rhodes' (“Rhodes”) second amended complaint (“SAC”), holding that they had not been exhausted, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (“PLRA”), which states “[n]o action shall be brought with respect to prison conditions under [42 U.S.C. § 1983], 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.” See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). We reverse, holding that the claims were sufficiently alleged to survive sua sponte dismissal under the PLRA.
Rhodes is a prisoner in the California prison system who has filed numerous administrative grievances about the treatment he received from guards while in custody at the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi (“CCI”). On December 26, 2001, Rhodes initiated this lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, by placing his original complaint in the prison mail system. He alleged that prison guards at CCI had violated his civil rights by retaliating against him for exercising his First Amendment right to pursue the prison grievance process against them. The complaint was officially filed with the district court on January 4, 2002.
Defendants filed a motion to dismiss Rhodes' claims, which the district court granted. We reversed on appeal. See Rhodes v. Robinson, 408 F.3d 559 (9th Cir.2005). On remand to the district court, Rhodes filed his SAC on March 20, 2006, which added claims thirteen through thirty-three. These claims allege that the same defendant guards perpetrated new retaliatory acts against Rhodes between January 2, 2002, and November 15, 2003, in response to his initiating this lawsuit.
Rhodes' SAC was filed on a form for pro se prisoner-litigants. He checked boxes on the form that stated, and thereby alleged, that he had completed the grievance process available at CCI concerning the facts relating to the new claims alleged in the SAC. Nothing in his SAC, or any documents attached to it, controverted that allegation.
The PLRA incorporates a screening procedure, which provides that the “court shall review, before docketing, if feasible or, in any event, as soon as practicable after docketing, a complaint in a civil action in which a prisoner seeks redress from a governmental entity or officer or employee of a governmental entity.” 28 U.S.C. § 1915A(a). Upon review, the court may dismiss the complaint, or any portion of it, if it “is frivolous, malicious, or fails to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.” See 28 U.S.C. § 1915A(b)(1). Defendants suggested that the district court screen the SAC in order to “determine whether Plaintiff failed to satisfy the mandatory precondition to bringing suit in federal court, to wit: exhaustion of any available administrative remedies before challenging prison conditions in federal court.”
The district court sua sponte dismissed claims thirteen through thirty-three for failure to exhaust under § 1997e. It interpreted our decision in McKinney v. Carey, 311 F.3d 1198, 1199-1201 (9th Cir.2002) (per curiam), as requiring that claim exhaustion must occur prior to the filing of the original complaint. It then held that Rhodes had failed properly to exhaust claims thirteen through thirty-three, reasoning that because they arose from events occurring between January 2, 2002, and November 15, 2003, “any exhaustion of these claims necessarily occurred after the filing of this action,” on January 4, 2002.
Rhodes timely appeals. 1 The district court had jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331 and 1343. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. We review the district court's legal conclusions de novo. See Wyatt v. Terhune, 315 F.3d 1108, 1117 (9th Cir.2003).
The district court erred in dismissing the additional claims set forth in Rhodes' SAC for failure to exhaust under § 1997e. The district court reasoned that the PLRA's exhaustion requirement bars amended complaints from asserting new claims based on conduct that occurred after the initial complaint was “brought,” even when the prisoner has exhausted the administrative remedies available to address this new conduct before filing the amended complaint. In doing so, the district court relied on our opinion in McKinney. More recently, we interpreted the PLRA's exhaustion requirement in Vaden v. Summerhill, 449 F.3d 1047 (9th Cir.2006). Neither of these cases, however, addresses the circumstance of the case at bench, in which a prisoner is filing an amended complaint based on new conduct. Nor do they support the dismissal of claims thirteen through thirty-three, which were newly added in Rhodes' SAC.
McKinney held that the PLRA's exhaustion requirement does not allow a prisoner to file a complaint addressing non-exhausted claims, even if the prisoner exhausts his administrative remedies while his case is pending. See 311 F.3d at 1199. Vaden held that a prisoner must exhaust his administrative remedies before he tenders his complaint to the district court. See 449 F.3d at 1050. Vaden also held that the claims which are exhausted after the complaint has been tendered to the district court, but before the district court grants him permission to proceed in forma pauperis and files his complaint, must be dismissed pursuant to § 1997e. See id. at 1050-51. Together, these cases stand for the proposition that a prisoner must exhaust his administrative remedies for the claims contained within his complaint before that complaint is tendered to the district court.
Neither McKinney's holding that exhaustion is a prerequisite to suit (as opposed to merely a prerequisite to judgment), nor Vaden's holding that a case is “brought” within the meaning of § 1997e at the time it is tendered to the district court (as opposed to the time it is filed by the clerk), requires the dismissal of the newly-alleged claims in Rhodes' SAC. Rather, they support Rhodes' argument that the new claims in his SAC should not have been dismissed, because they were properly exhausted before he tendered his SAC to the district court for filing.
Both McKinney and Vaden must be read and applied in the larger context of the pleading framework established by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. As a general rule, when a plaintiff files an amended complaint, “[t]he amended complaint supercedes the original, the latter being treated thereafter as non-existent.” Loux v. Rhay, 375 F.2d 55, 57 (9th Cir.1967). Nothing in the PLRA's exhaustion requirement creates an exception to this basic premise of our jurisprudence on pleadings.
As the Supreme Court has admonished, “courts should generally not depart from the usual practice under the Federal Rules on the basis of perceived policy concerns” when interpreting the PLRA. Jones v. Bock, 549 U.S. 199, 212, 127 S.Ct. 910, 166 L.Ed.2d 798 (2007). In drafting the PLRA, “when Congress meant to depart from the usual procedural requirements, it did so expressly.” Id. at 216, 127 S.Ct. 910. Addressing an exhaustion issue related to, but not directly controlling, the case at bench, the Court held that the PLRA “does not-explicitly or implicitly-justify deviating from the usual procedural practice beyond the departures specified by the PLRA itself.” Id. at 214, 127 S.Ct. 910.
In Jones, the Supreme Court struck down a Sixth Circuit decision requiring prisoners to plead exhaustion or face dismissal during the district court's PLRA screening process, holding that the circuit's decision imposed an impermissible judicially-created heightened pleading requirement. In doing so, it reasoned that “[t]here is ... no reason to suppose that the normal pleading rules have to be altered to facilitate” the PLRA's screening and exhaustion requirements. Id.
In these circumstances, the new claims in Rhodes' SAC were “brought” within the meaning of § 1997e on March 20, 2006, when he tendered that complaint for filing with his motion for leave to file an amended complaint. The SAC alleged that, at the time of filing, all of the claims within it had been properly exhausted. Defendants' argument that the PLRA requires the newly-added claims in the SAC to have been exhausted before the original complaint was “brought” on January 4, 2002, fails because it ignores the general rule of pleading that the SAC completely supercedes any earlier complaint, rendering the original complaint non-existent and, thus, its filing date irrelevant.
The Seventh Circuit addressed the same issue of the PLRA's treatment of amended complaints in a slightly different, but closely analogous, context. Its holding in Barnes v. Briley, 420 F.3d 673 (7th Cir.2005), supports reversing the district court's dismissal of claims thirteen through thirty-three. In Barnes, an inmate brought an action under the Federal Tort Claims Act (“FTCA”) in October of 2000. Id. at 675. In August 2003, in light of subsequent factual developments in his case, the inmate moved to file a second amended complaint...
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