Mays v. Sherburne County Jail

Background

Otis Mays moved for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, which are emergency court orders intended to prevent immediate harm while a case continues. He asked the court to require the Sherburne County Jail to provide law-library and computer access so he could prepare a typed petition for rehearing in an appeal. He also asked to fax filings to courts, or alternatively to stop the jail from holding his legal mail and delaying court documents.

Mays was housed in the jail’s Gamma unit. Unlike other general-population units, Gamma did not have a law library with computers, a legal research database, or tablets for legal research and word processing. A computer in the booking area was normally available to Gamma residents, but movement restrictions imposed after a COVID-19 outbreak prevented Mays from using it. He said these restrictions interfered with his filing deadlines. He was pursuing a rehearing request in an appeal and also identified cases in this court, federal court in Oklahoma, and the Eighth Circuit.

Court’s analysis

The court applied the four-part test for emergency injunctive relief: likely irreparable harm, meaning harm that is certain, serious, and imminent; a balance of harms favoring the person seeking relief; a likelihood of success on the merits; and consistency with the public interest.

The court focused on the lack of imminent actual injury. Mays had already filed a petition for rehearing on July 14, 2021, and a handwritten amended petition on September 8, 2021. The record did not show that the Eighth Circuit had struck those filings or would refuse to review them because they were handwritten. The deadline Mays identified had also passed, so the court found no present need for an order intended to help him meet that deadline.

The court separately rejected Mays’s arguments about faxing documents in this case and in his Oklahoma case. Mays relied on a seven-day deadline in a September 14 order, but the court explained that the deadline applied to the defendants if they wanted to show good cause for not copying discovery materials to a portable storage device; it did not impose a deadline on Mays. Regarding the Oklahoma case, Mays said he received an order late, but he did not show that the Oklahoma court had held him to the response deadline despite that delay.

The court also held that the requested injunction was not sufficiently related to the claims in Mays’s complaint. Those claims concerned alleged problems involving prescription eyeglasses, statements that increased his risk of assault, unsanitary cell conditions, retaliation, threats, transfers, medical treatment, and disciplinary procedures. The court found that those allegations did not concern the jail’s alleged interference with Mays’s access to the courts. It noted that this did not mean a federal court could never address conduct interfering with an inmate’s ability to litigate, but found that Mays had not made the required showing here.

Disposition

The Report and Recommendation recommended that Mays’s motion be denied. The notice stated that the report was not an order or judgment of the District Court and was not directly appealable to the Eighth Circuit. It also stated that a party could file specific written objections within 14 days after being served with the report. The recommendation was signed by United States Magistrate Judge Katherine Menendez.