Kikongo Hakim-Akbar Jones v. Gavin Newsom

Background

Kikongo Hakim-Akbar Jones, a California prisoner proceeding without a lawyer, sued officials at Salinas Valley State Prison. The operative complaint alleged that Dr. Barbosa, Dr. Singh, and Chief Executive Officer Sawyer were deliberately indifferent to his serious mental-health needs, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The alleged events included Jones’s placement on suicide watch, his discharge from psychiatric care, a suicide attempt, and later placements in crisis-level care and administrative segregation.

Defendants Singh and Sawyer moved for summary judgment. Defendant Barbosa was not served and did not appear, but the court stated that the claim failed against all three defendants and entered summary judgment in Barbosa’s favor as well.

Exhaustion requirement

The Prison Litigation Reform Act requires a prisoner to exhaust available administrative remedies before bringing an action about prison conditions under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. For healthcare-related grievances, the court explained that California’s procedures required use of a CDCR-602 HC form, followed by an appeal to the Health Care Correspondence and Appeal Branch. The court applied the rule that exhaustion had to be completed before Jones filed the operative complaint on May 28, 2020.

Court’s analysis

The court concluded that Jones had not exhausted any grievance by that date. Of his healthcare grievances, two were submitted after the complaint was filed, two were never appealed to the headquarters level, five were appealed after the complaint was filed, and two had been appealed but had not yet been decided or reached their response deadlines when the complaint was filed. His non-healthcare grievance also had not received a decision before filing.

The court rejected Jones’s argument that an 1824 form exhausted his claim. It explained that an 1824 form is used for accommodation requests, while healthcare claims must be pursued through the healthcare-grievance process. The court also rejected Jones’s arguments that he had exhausted grievances described in earlier filings or that lower-ranking staff had forced him to abandon the process, finding that those arguments were unsupported and would not establish exhaustion before filing.

Disposition

The court held that Jones’s failure to exhaust required dismissal and that amendment would be futile because an amended complaint could not cure the failure to exhaust before the original action was filed. The court therefore granted the motion for summary judgment, entered summary judgment in favor of all three defendants, and dismissed the action without prejudice to refiling in a new action after proper exhaustion. The clerk was directed to enter judgment and close the file.

Under the classification convention, this is a substantive ruling because the court ruled on a summary-judgment motion, although the ruling rested on the threshold issue of administrative exhaustion rather than on whether the officials violated the Eighth Amendment.