When Russell Showers attempted to vindicate his rights after experiencing over five years of chronic and debilitating pain due to inadequate and delayed treatment, the district court shut the courthouse doors based on an erroneous interpretation of the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s exhaustion provision. The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting to ensure that courts give a fair shake to meritorious claims made by incarcerated people, like Mr. Showers, who represent themselves.
Mr. Showers, a man incarcerated at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, has been suffering from debilitating neck and back pain. For more than five and half years, he has made attempt after attempt to get prison officials to adequately treat his chronic condition, but the medical staff have ignored the recommendations of an outside specialist, delayed prescribed changes in medications and follow up visits, and allowed Mr. Showers’s pain medication to expire. Meanwhile, his chronic pain has become more severe, at times preventing him from getting out of bed. After years of inadequate and delayed treatment, the damage is likely permanent, requiring surgery.
Mr. Showers attempted to vindicate his rights in federal court pro se – meaning representing himself – diligently exhausting all available administrative remedies. He even filed a supplemental complaint to ensure the district court could address all claims concerning his inadequate treatment.
But despite his efforts, the district court closed the courthouse doors to Mr. Showers, holding that that he had failed to exhaust administration remedies. Not only did the district court disregard settled Third Circuit precedent that a post-exhaustion amended complaint corrects an initial failure to exhaust under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). The court also ignored a number of fully exhausted grievances that were in the record and that defendants explicitly conceded were both exhausted and relevant; and established a novel and nonsensical rule that Mr. Showers had to exhaust grievances about events postdating the complaint before filing the complaint.
The MacArthur Justice Center, alongside Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, represents Mr. Showers in his appeal to the Third Circuit.