Willis v. Taylor

Background

Calvin Willis filed this pro se civil-rights action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against San Quentin State Prison correctional officer Matthew Taylor and others. Willis alleges that Taylor used excessive force against him on March 14, 2019, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Taylor moved for summary judgment based on failure to exhaust administrative remedies. Exhaustion means completing the required prison grievance process before bringing the federal lawsuit. The court denied that motion after finding a genuine factual dispute about whether the grievance process was effectively unavailable to Willis for Grievance No. SQ-A-19-01083.

The court previously found that the record could support the conclusion that Willis resubmitted his appeal of a second-level grievance decision between August 5 and September 3, 2019, but that the appeal did not reach the prison’s Office of Appeals through no fault of his own. Willis later asked the Office of Appeals for a status update on December 23, 2019, and received a January 3, 2020 response indicating that the office had no record of receiving the resubmitted appeal. The court said that any resubmission after January 3, 2020, would have been untimely.

Request for additional briefing

The court had given Taylor a choice between a limited evidentiary hearing about whether Willis submitted the appeal and waiving the exhaustion defense and proceeding to the merits. Taylor initially chose a limited hearing, then withdrew that request after further investigation. Taylor accepted that Willis mailed his appeal to the Office of Appeals in August 2019 but argued that the office did not receive it and that Willis failed to pursue additional available remedies after the January 3, 2020 response.

Taylor asked for permission to file supplemental briefing on that legal issue. The court denied the request. Relying on Ninth Circuit precedent, the court held that when prison officials improperly fail to process a prisoner’s grievance, the prisoner is deemed to have exhausted available administrative remedies. The court found that Willis appealed the second-level response, received no response, and was not instructed by prison officials to resubmit the appeal or otherwise pursue the grievance. Under those circumstances, the court found that Willis had exhausted the available administrative remedies.

Order and next steps

The court ordered Taylor to file a dispositive motion addressing the merits by April 30, 2025. Willis’s opposition is due 28 days after the motion is filed, and Taylor’s reply is due 14 days after the opposition is filed. The motion will be submitted on the reply deadline, and no hearing will be held. If Taylor files a motion for summary judgment, it must include the required notice explaining how Willis can oppose it. The order denied Taylor’s request for supplemental briefing and terminated Docket No. 29; it did not decide whether Taylor is liable for excessive force.