Ortiz v. Capra

Background

Elmer Ortiz sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a federal civil-rights law, alleging that Corrections Officer S. Holliday and other corrections officers assaulted him at Sing Sing Correctional Facility on December 28, 2014. Ortiz alleged excessive force and failure to protect him under the Eighth Amendment. He also asserted claims concerning alleged denial of medical services, solitary confinement, transfer to another facility, destruction of legal papers, and inadequate supervision by Michael Capra and Anthony Annucci.

Defendants previously moved for partial dismissal under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) and for summary judgment based on failure to exhaust administrative remedies. The court dismissed the claims against Capra and Annucci and the claims concerning medical services, solitary confinement, transfer, and destruction of property. That ruling left the excessive-force and failure-to-protect claims against Holliday. The court denied summary judgment at that stage because there was a factual dispute about whether Ortiz had tried to file a grievance that prison officials failed to process, and it ordered an exhaustion hearing.

Grievance process and hearing

The Prison Litigation Reform Act requires a prisoner to use available prison grievance procedures before bringing a federal civil-rights action about prison conditions. The ordinary New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision process generally required an inmate to file a grievance with the Inmate Grievance Resolution Committee, appeal an adverse decision to the facility superintendent, and then appeal to the Central Office Review Committee. The regulations also provided an expedited process for harassment complaints.

Ortiz testified that he obtained writing materials from a corrections officer, prepared a grievance describing the assault, and placed the original in a locked mailbox carried by the same unnamed officer. He said he later wrote to the grievance committee after receiving no response and eventually attempted to appeal to the Central Office Review Committee. The grievance committee supervisor responded that there was no record of a complaint other than an earlier grievance from September 2014. The Central Office Review Committee’s database contained no appeal from Ortiz concerning the December 2014 assault.

Other witnesses testified about how grievances could be filed and about records showing staff visits to the special housing unit. After the hearing, the parties spent more than a year trying to identify the unnamed officer. Ortiz could not identify the officer from photographs or the available logbooks and ultimately sought to call two officers to whom he acknowledged he had not given the grievance.

Analysis

The court explained that exhaustion is mandatory when administrative remedies are available. It also recognized that a grievance procedure may be unavailable when it operates as a dead end, is too confusing to use, or prison officials prevent an inmate from using it. Under controlling precedent, an inmate in the special housing unit may exhaust available remedies by giving a grievance to a corrections officer if the grievance then disappears.

The court found that exception did not apply because it found Ortiz’s account not credible. The court relied on his inability to identify an officer whom he said he saw nearly every day and whose name he previously knew, his inability to identify the officer from photographs, the absence of records supporting his claimed follow-up letter and appeal, the absence of a related appeal in the Central Office Review Committee’s database, and what the court described as his possession of some documents but not others. The court concluded that Ortiz never placed the assault-related grievance in the mailbox and that his contrary statements were fabrications.

Disposition

The court found that Ortiz failed to exhaust his available administrative remedies and stated that this failure was fatal to his remaining claim. Judge Richard J. Sullivan ordered that the Second Amended Complaint be dismissed in its entirety for failure to exhaust, denied Ortiz’s request to call additional witnesses as moot, and ordered the Clerk to enter judgment for the defendants and close the case. The opinion does not state that the dismissal was with or without prejudice.