Summary
dismissing infestation claim based on a single mouse bite
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21-2738
12-22-2022
JAMES MUNSON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. KEVIN KINK, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
Submitted December 21, 2022
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. No. 19-cv-88-DWD David W. Dugan, Judge.
Before ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge MICHAEL Y. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge AMY J. ST. EVE, Circuit Judge
ORDER
James Munson, an Illinois prisoner, appeals the entry of summary judgment on the following claims: Eighth Amendment claims about a pest infestation at his former prison that, he says, adversely affected his health, and a First Amendment claim that officials retaliated against him for filing grievances about those pests. Munson has not adduced evidence sufficient to persuade a reasonable jury that any defendant subjected him to unconstitutional conditions of confinement, recklessly disregarded a substantial risk to his health, or retaliated against him for complaining; thus we affirm.
We view the facts in the light that favors Munson. Henry v. Hulett, 969 F.3d 769, 774 (7th Cir. 2020) (en banc). Munson was housed at Lawrence Correctional Center starting in February 2017 (he has since been transferred to a different prison). While there, he saw rodents throughout, including in his cell. Munson submitted a grievance in mid-2018 about a "rodent and bug" problem at the prison. About two months later, an officer denied the grievance because Lawrence was paying outside exterminators to combat pests and check traps for rodents each month, and they had recently done so.
One time a mouse bit Munson, and medical staff treated him the same day. Early one morning in July 2018, while sleeping, he felt a "prick" on his hand, which began to bleed, and he discovered a mouse in his bed. Munson killed it and called for help. Officers then took him to the prison's medical unit for treatment of the bite. Munson brought the dead mouse with him and asked a nurse to test it for rabies, but she refused, stating that the unit did not test animals. The nurse evaluated the bite, cleaned it with antibiotic ointment, saw no signs of tetanus, and gave Munson additional ointment and bandages to take with him. Munson filed a grievance about the bite and his medical care, but a grievance officer denied it, again citing the exterminator visits.
Six days after the bite, Munson was moved to segregation for four weeks. Prison staff explain that Munson had asked to move to another prison and part of the protocol was to reassess his security risk. That required his isolation in segregation while his risk level was reclassified. (He did not end up transferring then.) On his second day there, Munson met with a therapist and complained of recurring nightmares about rodents. The therapist gave him a kit offering techniques to aid sleep. Munson asserts that the kit was ineffective in helping him sleep, but he did not report any further sleep issues to the therapist, who noted that she did not observe any mental-health consequences from Munson's time spent in segregation. In his remaining time in segregation, Munson says, he frequently saw insects entering his cell through the window and twice visited a nurse for treatment of insect bites, for which he was given hydrocortisone cream.
About two months after Munson returned to the general-population unit, in November 2018, he wrote a letter to Teresa Boose, an administrator who oversaw mental-health services at Lawrence. He complained of "stress" and "anxiety attacks" that he continued to suffer after the mouse bite. He placed the letter in a healthcare request box in his housing unit. Boose tells us that she never saw the letter's contents. She says that she first learned about Munson's complaints about his mental-health only after another administrator mentioned them at a meeting in June 2019, at which time she referred Munson to mental-health professionals for evaluation.
This suit came next. Munson argues that the defendants violated his Eighth Amendment rights by exposing him to pests and ignoring the adverse health effects of the infestation. He also asserted that the defendants violated the First Amendment by sending him to segregation in retaliation for his grievances about the pests and because he upset a nurse by bringing a dead mouse into the healthcare unit. After discovery, the court granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment. It ruled that Munson had not shown that the infestation was inhumane, that any defendant recklessly ignored a risk of serious harm to his health, or that his grievances led to his placement in segregation.
On appeal, Munson first contests summary judgment on his Eighth Amendment claims. To survive summary judgment on these claims, Munson needed to furnish evidence sufficient to persuade a reasonable jury that the prison's conditions created an excessive risk to his health and safety by denying him "the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities," and that the defendants knew of and disregarded this risk of harm. Thomas v. Blackard, 2 F.4th 716, 719-20 (7th Cir. 2021) (internal citation omitted).
The record shows that, far from disregarding the infestation that Munson frequently saw and reported, prison officials reasonably attempted to mitigate it. Munson does not dispute that prison officials hired an exterminator to visit monthly, spray for pests, and set and check traps for rodents. A jury could thus not conclude that the defendants ignored the risk of harm. Further, the situation that Munson describes is no worse than that in Sain v. Wood, 512 F.3d 886, 894 (7th Cir. 2008). There, we ruled that the presence of many cockroaches in a prisoner's cell over several years, leading to two bites, but mitigated by an exterminator who visited each month, was not sufficiently "prolonged" and "significant" to amount to an "objectively serious" constitutional violation. Id. Thus, the defendants did not violate their constitutional duty to provide humane conditions at Lawrence. See Thomas, 2 F.4th at 719-20.
Next, Munson challenges summary judgment on his claims about healthcare. The only two arguments that he develops in his opening brief are about his mentalhealth care; we thus limit our review to them. See Clarett v. Roberts, 657 F.3d 664, 674 (7th Cir. 2011). To stave off summary judgment, Munson needed to supply evidence that a defendant deliberately ignored his mental health. Quinn v. Wexford Health Sources, Inc., 8 F.4th 557, 565 (7th Cir. 2021). He first argues that Boose disregarded his mental health by ignoring the letter (in which he complained of stress and anxiety following the mouse bite) that he wrote and placed in his unit's healthcare request box. We may assume that Boose received and read the letter, see Stewart v. Wexford Health Sources, Inc., 14 F.4th 757, 767 (7th Cir. 2021), but that alone does not get Munson past summary judgment. Munson needed to present evidence that he actually had unresolved stress and anxiety, not just that he wrote a letter to Boose about it, and that the condition persisted during the intervening months before Boose referred him to a mental-health provider. But he furnished no such evidence of an unresolved mental-health injury during that time. See Lord v. Beahm, 952 F.3d 902, 905 (7th Cir. 2020) (observing that a § 1983 plaintiff cannot prevail without "developing evidence of a recoverable injury"). Regardless, it is undisputed that once Boose learned about Munson's mental-health request from another administrator, she responded to it immediately. Thus a reasonable jury could not find that she deliberately ignored his mental health. See Quinn, 8 F.4th at 566.
Munson next argues that he presented a triable case that the therapist he saw while in segregation disregarded his mental-health needs. He is incorrect. The undisputed record shows that when he complained to the therapist about his nightmares, she responded by giving him sleep techniques and meeting regularly with him afterward to evaluate his mental health. He did not report to her any further sleep issues, she observed no ongoing mental-health problems, and Munson points to no medical evidence suggesting that her responses to him were reckless.
That brings us to the district court's ruling on his claim that prison officials retaliated against him for his grievances by sending him to segregation. To present a triable claim, Munson needed to furnish evidence suggesting that (1) he engaged in activity protected by the First Amendment; (2) he suffered a deprivation reasonably likely to deter such protected activity; and (3) the protected activity was at least a motivating factor in the prison officials' decision to impose the deprivation. Watkins v. Kasper, 599 F.3d 791, 794 (7th Cir. 2010).
We may assume that Munson's grievances about pests are protected activities, see Holleman v. Zatecky, 951 F.3d 873, 878 (7th Cir. 2020), but no evidence suggests that they led to his segregation. Devbrow v. Gallegos, 735 F.3d 584, 587-88 (7th Cir. 2013). The uncontradicted evidence is that, in order to process his request to move to another prison, he was transferred to segregation to reassess his security risk. Munson responds by speculating that the defendants transferred him because, six days earlier, he filed his grievance about a mouse bite and brought the dead mouse into the healthcare unit. But other than suspicious timing, which rarely alone is sufficient to show causation, Kidwell v. Eisenhauer, 679 F.3d 957, 966 (7th Cir. 2012), he has not linked the transfer to his grievance. He thus cannot avoid summary judgment on this claim.
AFFIRMED
We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not significantly aid the court. FED. R. APP. p. 34(a)(2)(C).