14-e-4 What Must You Put in Your Grievance or Administrative Appeal?

• Library: A Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual (2020 Edition)

14-E-4. What Must You Put in Your Grievance or Administrative Appeal?

Exhausting means you must raise all of the issues that you intend to raise in your lawsuit in your grievance or appeal. Issues you do not include in your grievance or appeal cannot be brought up later in a lawsuit.²⁸⁵ Sometimes, most often in connection with disciplinary proceedings, you have to use more than one remedy to exhaust all your issues. For example, if you are challenging a disciplinary decision to revoke your visitation privileges, you must both appeal the sentence through your prison's disciplinary proceedings and file an administrative grievance about the loss of your visitation privileges.

How specific and detailed must you be in a grievance or appeal to satisfy the exhaustion requirement? The Supreme Court recently held that courts could not require that prisoners name all the defendants in their grievances that they later named in their court complaints if the grievance system itself did not have such a requirement.²⁸⁶ The Court said: "The level of detail necessary in a grievance to comply with the grievance procedures will vary from system to system and claim to claim, but it is the prison's requirements, and not the PLRA, that define the boundaries of proper exhaustion."²⁸⁷ For example, if the prison grievance system does require you to name the responsible employees in your grievance, and you have that information, then you have to name them. Anyone that you didn't name in the grievance could not be named as a defendant in a later lawsuit.²⁸⁸

Currently, most grievance systems do not have such specific requirements. Either they say nothing about the level of detail required in your grievances, or the requirements are very general.²⁸⁹ One court has said that if the prison grievance policy does not have more specific requirements, then a grievance counts as exhausting "if it alerts the prison to the nature of the wrong for which redress is sought."²⁹⁰ In making your grievance, normally you do not need to "lay out the facts, articulate legal theories, or demand particular relief. All the grievance need do is object intelligibly to some asserted shortcoming."²⁹¹ This makes sense because the purpose of the PLRA exhaustion requirement is to give prison officials time and opportunity to resolve problems before they turn into lawsuits.²⁹² An example of a grievance that satisfied the "object intelligibly" standard (though just barely) is found in a sexual assault case where the prisoner said only: "[T]he administration don't [sic] do there [sic] job. [A sexual assault] should've never [sic] happen again," and requested that the assailant be criminally prosecuted.²⁹³

Even courts that do not cite the "object intelligibly" standard generally do not require grievances to be very specific or detailed.²⁹⁴ Courts also tend to reject prison officials' overly technical arguments about the adequacy of a grievance.²⁹⁵ Courts have usually only held grievances inadequate when they were so vague that prison officials could not reasonably have been expected to understand what the prisoner was complaining about.²⁹⁶

There are exceptions. Some courts have required much greater detail and specificity in grievances even if the prison grievance policy did not require that type of detail. For example, one recent decision said it was not sufficient for the prisoner to have claimed that he was denied treatment for his injured finger at every prison where he had been.²⁹⁷ The court said he should have written that he was denied access to an orthopedic surgeon around a particular date, then transferred two months later and denied medical care.²⁹⁸ In particular, a number of courts have held grievances inadequate because they failed to specifically mention prisoners' legal claims that the prisoners later included in their lawsuits, including denial of First Amendment rights,²⁹⁹ unlawful retaliation,³⁰⁰ discrimination contrary to the Equal Protection Clause,³⁰¹ and conspiracy.³⁰² This was the case even if the...