Opinion
22-1596
12-15-2022
GLENN T. TURNER, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. GARY BOUGHTON, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
Submitted December 13, 2022 [*]
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. No. 17-cv-203-jdp James D. peterson, Chief Judge.
Before FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge, DIANE p. WOOD, Circuit Judge, THOMAS L. KIRSCH II, Circuit Judge.
ORDER
Glenn Turner, a Wisconsin prisoner, appeals the entry of summary judgment in his suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. He brings three broad categories of challenges. First, he contends that the process and rationale for keeping him in administrative and disciplinary segregation were unconstitutional. Second, he argues that the conditions in segregation were inhumane. Finally, he contests some procedural rulings. Seeing no error in any of the court's decisions, we affirm.
I. Administrative and Disciplinary Segregation
Background
Turner has been incarcerated at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility since 2010, and he has spent most of that time in administrative or disciplinary segregation. Turner contests the basis for both types of segregation, and we discuss administrative segregation first. Prisoners in administrative segregation receive periodic reviews in which prison officials determine whether the segregation remains appropriate. WIS. ADMIN. CODE DOC § 308.04(10). Before each renewal, the prison officials reviewed Turner's latest conduct reports. From 2010 to 2017, these included reports of gang communications, inciting a disturbance, threats, assault, and creating a weapon. Turner believes that these officials kept renewing his administrative segregation based on a one-time finding (his prior status as a member of the Gangster Disciples) that, he says, he could not contest or review and was no longer accurate.
Turner also contests two periods of disciplinary segregation, based on two conduct reports. The first was issued in 2011, after the prison's security coordinator confiscated letters and legal documents from Turner's cell. The letters seem to discuss class-action lawsuits, but the coordinator identified phrases in them that he thought were coded gang messages. When Turner did not answer questions about the letters, he was placed in the prison's most restrictive unit and issued the conduct report. Turner was convicted of contacting a gang and sentenced to a year of disciplinary segregation.
The second disciplinary segregation stemmed from a similar incident in 2014. Turner admits that he wrote a letter to a relative that, on its face, described how to manage a nonprofit organization. He received a conduct report when the security coordinator again thought that the letter contained coded gang messages. At his hearing, the presiding officer also received a report from an officer alleging that Turner confessed to being a Gangster Disciple. Turner never saw the report and he denied confessing his gang membership. The presiding officer found Turner guilty of gang contacts and sentenced him to 120 days of disciplinary segregation, a decision that withstood appeals and grievances.
In 2017, Turner sued the prison officials involved in his administrative and disciplinary segregation. The district court allowed him to proceed on claims that the defendants who placed him in administrative segregation violated his right to due process by keeping him confined based on his supposed status as a Gangster Disciple, which he says he could not contest. It also allowed him to proceed against the defendants who put him in disciplinary segregation. (Turner filed his complaint only a few weeks before the then-applicable six-year statute of limitations had run on claims relating to the 2011 conduct report.) He asserted that they violated his right to due process (by using false evidence, denying him requested materials, and not considering his evidence) and his First Amendment rights (by punishing him for protected speech). During discovery, Turner sought the letters underlying the 2011 conduct report. They had been destroyed, so the defendants produced materials describing them-the conduct report and a contemporaneous analysis of the letters. Turner moved to sanction the defendants for destroying the letters, but the district court denied the motion, finding that Turner had produced no evidence suggesting that they destroyed the letters to hide adverse information in his suit.
The district court entered summary judgment for the defendants. First, it ruled that they did not violate Turner's due process rights because, regardless of the validity of the finding that he was once a Gangster Disciple, they had ample other reasons-the many infractions between 2010 and 2017-to keep Turner in administrative segregation. Second, the district court entered summary judgment for the defendants involved in the disciplinary segregation. It ruled that Turner was not entitled to see all evidence against him in an "informal, nonadversarial" process for disciplinary segregation, Westefer v. Neal, 682 F.3d 679, 684 (7th Cir. 2012), that falsified evidence alone does not reflect a denial of due process, Lagerstrom v. Kingston, 463 F.3d 621, 624-25 (7th Cir. 2006), and that the record did not support his assertion that the defendants ignored his evidence. Finally, the court ruled that no First Amendment violation occurred because the record showed that the defendants had an undisputed, legitimate penological reason to issue the reports-a sincere belief that the letters contained prohibited gang communications. See Brown v. Phillips, 801 F.3d 849, 855 (7th Cir. 2015).
Analysis
On appeal, Turner first contends that the defendants violated his federal right to due process because the administrative-segregation hearings did not comport with Wisconsin law. (As the parties did, we assume without deciding that Turner's time in segregation deprived him of a liberty interest and that the prison staff could not deprive him of that interest without due process.) But noncompliance with state law is not itself a violation of the federal right to due process. See Vargas v. Cook Cnty. Sheriff's Merit Bd., 952 F.3d 871, 875 (7th Cir. 2020). He also repeats that, to keep him in administrative segregation, they impermissibly relied on his one-time status as a gang member. But he does not deny that between 2010 and 2017 he repeatedly committed infractions- assault, threats, having a weapon, and inciting a disturbance-that put others in danger. He was not punished for mere status. Wisconsin law, which Turner does not contest, permits nonpunitive segregation based on such misconduct. See WIS. ADMIN. CODE DOC § 308.04(2).
As to disciplinary segregation, Turner contends that he should have survived summary judgment on his due process and First Amendment challenges to his move to the prison's restricted unit and the disciplinary segregation in 2011 and 2014. He first argues that the record contains insufficient evidence that the 2011 and 2014 letters show that he participated in prohibited gang communications. But Turner admitted that he wrote and received the letters described in the conduct reports. Those admissions are binding. See Williams v. Airborne Express, Inc., 521 F.3d 765, 766 (7th Cir. 2008). And the record contains evidence that the defendants had adequate reason to believe that the letters contained prohibited gang messages. Thus, the conduct reports and resulting discipline served a legitimate penological purpose compatible with due process and the First Amendment. See Brown, 801 F.3d at 855. Second, he contends that the 2011 hearing was procedurally flawed because the residing officer did not read the letters and thus lacked "some evidence" to convict him. But Turner does not dispute that the officer read the conduct report. The report described the letters and was sufficient by itself to support the discipline. See McPherson v. McBride, 188 F.3d 784, 786 (7th Cir. 1999).
Turner replies that the district court wrongly permitted the defendants to submit the conduct report and analysis of the letters, instead of the letters themselves. But those documents were admissible because they showed the defendants' suspicions and the reasons for them. See FED. R. EVID. 401; Gunville v. Walker, 583 F.3d 979, 985 (7th Cir. 2009). Moreover, as the district court observed, Turner identifies no evidence that the defendants destroyed the underlying letters for the purpose of hiding adverse information in litigation. See Bracey v. Grondin, 712 F.3d 1012, 1019 (7th Cir. 2013).
Finally, Turner argues that the district court should have not severed a claim that he sought to bring here-a challenge to the seizure of legal materials from his cell in 2011. But the district court reasonably determined that these claims were "discrete and separate" from the claims in this suit. Gaffney v. Riverboat Servs. of Ind., Inc., 451 F.3d 424, 442 (7th Cir. 2006) (internal citations omitted).
II. Conditions of Confinement
Background
In the second part of this suit, Turner depicts three features of confinement that, he believes, violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. First, he describes the conditions in and around his cell. He asserts that his cell is extremely loud and always illuminated, preventing him from sleeping more than four hours per night and producing severe headaches that required hospital care. He also faced restrictions on phone calls, personal possessions, exercise, and recreation. Second, he contends that he received inadequate mental-health care. He relies on a mentalhealth evaluation predating his arrival at the prison that diagnosed him with mentalhealth conditions requiring medicine and ongoing care. Before his transfer to the prison, though, a doctor (who is not a defendant) assessed that Turner no longer needed such regular, ongoing care. Finally, he says that the defendants subjected him to a painful handcuffing policy. Inmates, like Turner, who are classified as high-risk offenders, are handcuffed under a special procedure: When Turner leaves his cell, he first gives his shoes to an officer, who handcuffs his wrists behind his back and tethers him to a door. Turner then puts his shoes back on while cuffed in this position. This procedure, he says, yielded pain, numbness, and skin damage. Turner complained in writing to some defendants and filed grievances; in denying his grievances, prison officials told him to seek a medical accommodation. He requested a change to a "soft-cuff restriction," and the record shows that he received it in 2014.
The district court rejected all three claims. Insofar as Turner claimed that solitary confinement itself (or the light, noise, and other issues) violated his Eighth Amendment rights, it ruled that Turner did not present evidence that the defendants recklessly disregarded his health, or that they had feasible alternatives. As for the psychological-care claims, it concluded that, with one exception, Turner presented no evidence of unanswered mental-health requests. (Evidence suggested that one defendant ignored Turner's request in 2016 for care, and the court moved that claim to another suit about Turner's mental-health care.) Finally, for the handcuffing policy, the court ruled that no evidence suggested that the defendants recklessly ignored any known harm to Turner.
Analysis
On appeal, Turner first argues that his evidence of excessive noise and constant light in his cell created a genuine fact dispute about whether those conditions created an "excessive risk to [his] health and safety" that violated the Eighth Amendment. Isby v. Brown, 856 F.3d 508, 521 (7th Cir. 2017). But even if we assume that the noise and light seriously endangered his health, Turner also needed to furnish evidence that the defendants consciously disregarded that risk of harm. See Giles v. Godinez, 914 F.3d 1040, 1052 (7th Cir. 2019). The district court rightly concluded that Turner did not make this showing-he did not "say what he has done to inform defendants of his problem." On appeal, Turner still does not do so, speculating instead that the risk of harm was "obvious." But Turner does not cite any evidence that any defendant had reason to know that the light and noise affecting his cell was excessive, let alone that it kept him awake or produced severe headaches. Without such evidence, the claim fails.
Next, Turner contends that the district court improperly discounted his evidence suggesting that, before he arrived at the prison in 2010, he needed regular mental-health care. But his evidence is immaterial. Turner does not question the judgment of the doctor who, shortly before his arrival at the prison in 2010, assessed that he no longer needed regular psychological care. No reasonable jury could infer that the defendants were deliberately indifferent when they relied on that uncontested medical judgment. See Whiting v. Wexford Health Sources, Inc., 839 F.3d 658, 662-63 (7th Cir. 2016). Moreover, Turner's medical history shows that, after 2010 and with the exception of the one now-severed claim, Turner received psychological care whenever he asked for it. Turner responds that the district court wrongly considered records not cited in the defendants' proposed findings of fact, and that some of it was false. But a district court may consider any evidence in the record. See Stevo v. Frasor, 662 F.3d 880, 886-87 (7th Cir. 2011). And it was Turner's burden at the summary judgment stage to counter the defendants' records and support his belief that those records were false. See Giles, 914 F.3d at 1052. He did not.
Finally, Turner contends that the district court should not have entered summary judgment on his handcuffing claim because he presented evidence through his letters to the defendants that the cuffs hurt him, and yet "the cuffing policy continued." But the record contradicts Turner's contention that the policy "continued"-rather, it shows that he requested and received a "soft-cuff restriction." Thus no reasonable jury could infer that, through the handcuffing procedure, the defendants consciously disregarded the pain Turner reported to them. See id.
III. Remaining Rulings
Turner contests three other rulings that we briefly address. First, he argues that the district court erred in denying his request to recruit counsel. But the court did not abuse its discretion when it denied Turner's request. Following the standard in Pruitt v. Mote, 503 F.3d 647, 655 (7th Cir. 2007) (en banc), the district court reasonably observed that Turner was an experienced pro se litigator, had filed cogent legal documents, and could handle the types of claims that he raised here. Second, Turner contests (and we review de novo) the court's ruling that, because Turner had incurred three strikes under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g), he had to pay the case-filing fee upfront. Wallace v. Baldwin, 895 F.3d 481, 483 (7th Cir. 2018). The district court correctly identified three previous federal suits in which Turner failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted, or in which Turner's claim was legally frivolous. That satisfied the conditions of § 1915(g). Finally, Turner contends that the district court unreasonably denied his motion to alter or amend the judgment. But Turner's motion identified no "manifest error of law or fact" or "newly discovered evidence" that the district court overlooked. United States v. Resnick, 594 F.3d 562, 568 (7th Cir. 2010).
We thus AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.
[*] 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).