Phillip L. Miles v. Julie Anton

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 21-2796
PHILLIP L. M ILES ,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
JULIE A NTON ,
Defendant-Appellee.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Indiana, South Bend Division.
No. 3:20-cv-246 — Robert L. Miller, Jr., Judge.
____________________
A RGUED M AY 24, 2022 — DECIDED A UGUST 2, 2022
____________________
Before EASTERBROOK, WOOD, and BRENNAN , Circuit Judges.
WOOD, Circuit Judge. While incarcerated at Indiana State
Prison, Phillip Miles was fired from his commissary job by Of-
ficer Julie Anton because he missed work to attend a Muslim
prayer service. Miles sued Anton in her personal capacity for
violating his rights under the First Amendment. But because
Miles did not file a formal grievance before filing, the district
court found that he had failed to comply with the Prison Liti-
gation Reform Act’s exhaustion requirement, see 42 U.S.C.

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2 No. 21-2796
§ 1997e(a). The court thus granted summary judgment to An-
ton. Because the policy, properly understood, excepted his
claim from the prison’s administrative process, however,
there was no required step that Miles failed to take. We there-
fore reverse and remand the case for further proceedings.
I
A
On July 22, 2019, Officer Austin Nunn hired Miles for a job
in the Indiana State Prison commissary, with the understand-
ing that Miles would miss work on Fridays from 12pm to 2pm
to attend the prison’s weekly Jumu’ah Muslim prayer service.
Officer Julie Anton was to serve as Miles’s supervisor in the
commissary. Mere weeks later, on August 2, Anton refused to
allow Miles to attend Jumu’ah, threatening that he would be
“done” in the commissary if he left for the service. But Miles
went anyway. According to Officer Nunn’s sworn affidavit,
Anton proclaimed that “[Miles] cannot go every week to
Jumu’ah” and announced that if he did, she would fire him
under the guise of poor work performance. Sure enough, An-
ton fired Miles later that day based on a work evaluation that
accused Miles of stealing kitchen supplies. After Miles re-
ceived news of his firing on August 5, he tried to resolve the
issue with Anton informally, but he never received a response
from her. Miles acknowledges that he did not lodge a formal
grievance against Anton in relation to these events.
Soon after, Miles filed a grievance disputing the allegation
of theft as well as the negative work evaluation. On August
13, he was exonerated of the accusation of theft, and on Au-
gust 26, his negative work evaluation was reversed. Those de-
cisions allowed him to apply for new work assignments

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No. 21-2796 3
elsewhere in the prison. Officer Anton is no longer employed
by the Indiana Department of Correction.
B
In March 2020, while acting pro se, Miles sued Anton in her
individual capacity in federal district court under 42 U.S.C.
§ 1983, alleging that Anton violated his First Amendment
rights by refusing to let him attend religious services and then
retaliating against him when he nonetheless did so. The dis-
trict court rejected Miles’s request for recruited counsel but
allowed his First Amendment claims to proceed. Anton then
moved for summary judgment, relying on the affirmative de-
fense furnished by the exhaustion requirement of the Prison
Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). She
contended that Miles’s failure to file a formal grievance spe-
cifically focused on his firing before bringing this action was
inconsistent with the prison’s grievance procedures and
therefore warranted dismissal under the PLRA.
Indiana State Prison maintains an administrative process
that prisoners must use when pursuing a grievance against an
officer. First, the prisoner must try to resolve the issue infor-
mally by raising it with the relevant official. Prison Grievance
Policy § X. Second, the prisoner must submit a “State Form
45471 Offender Grievance” to the Offender Grievance Spe-
cialist within ten business days of the incident. Id. § XI. Third,
if the Offender Grievance Specialist rejects the claim, the pris-
oner has five business days after receiving the response to ap-
peal the negative decision to the Warden or the Warden’s de-
signee. Id. § XII. And fourth, if the prisoner disagrees with the
resolution of the appeal, he has five business days to lodge a
subsequent appeal to the “Department Offender Grievance
Manager,” whose decision is final. Id. § XIII.

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4 No. 21-2796
Here's the rub: not all issues are subject to this four-step
administrative process. Section IV(A) lists examples of issues
that are eligible for administrative review, while section IV(B)
lists examples of issues that are not eligible. Most notably, “an
offender may initiate the grievance process” in response to
the “[a]ctions of individual staff.” Id. § IV(A). But “matters in-
appropriate to the offender grievance process” include “clas-
sification actions or decisions” such as “loss of a job.” Id.
§ IV(B).
The district court granted Anton’s motion for summary
judgment, finding that Miles’s complaint did not fall within
the “classification actions” exception because he was object-
ing not to the loss of his job as such, but rather to his uncon-
stitutional treatment at the hands of an individual staff mem-
ber. This distinction, however, does not hold up under scru-
tiny. Whatever her motivation, Anton’s decision to fire Miles
was a “classification action” connected to the “loss of a job.”
It is therefore not grievable under the plain language of the
policy.
II
A
We evaluate grants of summary judgment de novo, view-
ing all facts in the light most favorable to the non-moving
party. FKFJ, Inc. v. Vill. of Worth, 11 F.4th 574, 585 (7th Cir.
2021). Moreover, “exhaustion is an affirmative defense, and
consequently the burden of proof is on the prison officials.”
Kaba v. Stepp, 458 F.3d 678, 680 (7th Cir. 2006). Given the com-
bination of these two standards, we must construe all factual
disputes in Miles’s favor and then consider whether Anton

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No. 21-2796 5
has demonstrated beyond dispute that Miles acted inconsist-
ently with the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement.
The PLRA requires a prisoner to exhaust “such adminis-
trative remedies as are available” before bringing an action
challenging prison conditions. 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). A suit
filed before the prisoner has exhausted these remedies “must
be dismissed.” Perez v. Wisconsin Dep’t of Corr., 182 F.3d 532,
535 (7th Cir. 1999). But the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement
“contains one significant qualifier: the remedies must indeed
be ‘available’ to the prisoner.” Ross v. Blake, 578 U.S. 632, 639
(2016). This qualification has led to two paths that excuse a
prisoner from the normal duty to exhaust. If a remedy is “of-
ficially on the books” but the remedy is incapable of use in
practice, perhaps because the prison’s grievance processes
have not been maintained or are unduly difficult to navigate,
then the duty to exhaust falls away. See id. at 643–44 (outlin-
ing three different kinds of practical unavailability). Likewise,
there is no duty to exhaust if a remedy for an issue is not “of-
ficially on the books”—that is, provided for in the text of the
written grievance policy—in the first place.
This case falls into the latter category, where the text of the
grievance policy is dispositive. As we noted earlier, section
IV(A) (titled “Matters Appropriate to the Offender Grievance
Process”) provides “[e]xamples of issues about which an of-
fender may initiate the grievance process.” The district court
found that the third item in that list—“[a]ctions of individual
staff, contractors, or volunteers”—encompassed Miles’s com-
plaint. But section IV(B) (titled “Matters Inappropriate to the
Offender Grievance Process”) provides more detailed
“[e]xamples of non-grievable issues,” and that list names

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6 No. 21-2796
“[c]lassification actions or decisions, which include loss of a
job.”
Though Anton’s decision to fire Miles was no doubt an
“action[] of individual staff,” that open-ended and all-encom-
passing provision is limited by the more specific section IV(B)
exceptions. Narrowing a document’s general or default lan-
guage so as to render it compatible with specific exceptions is
a mainstay of legal interpretation. Cf. RadLAX Gateway Hotel,
LLC v. Amalgamated Bank, 566 U.S. 639, 645 (2012) (“[I]t is a
commonplace of statutory construction that the specific gov-
erns the general.”); N.L.R.B. v. SW General, Inc., 137 S. Ct. 929,
941 (2017) (“The general prohibition on acting service by
nominees yields to the more specific authorization allowing
officers up for reappointment to remain at their posts.”). And
while a prison’s grievance policy is admittedly not a statute
subject to every norm of statutory interpretation, there is a
strong case for reading the section IV(A) default language to
accommodate the enumerated exceptions. Because every issue
a prisoner might confront will be connected to the “actions”
of individual correctional officers, reading the section IV(A)
provision expansively would transform the formal grievance
process into a universal requirement. But that would not
square with sections IV(A) and IV(B), which together create a
careful regime in which some issues are grievable and others
are not. The policy is therefore best read as barring prisoners
from grieving an officer’s hiring or firing decision.
B
The question, then, is whether Miles is challenging An-
ton’s decision to fire him as opposed to some other action sep-
arate from that decision. The district court saw a distinction
between the firing decision and the reason behind it—Anton’s

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No. 21-2796 7
allegedly unconstitutional refusal to accommodate Miles’s re-
ligion. But the proposed distinction between Anton’s action
and its constitutional implications lacks footing in the lan-
guage of the policy. The policy categorizes actions as grievable
or non-grievable without regard for their motivating reasons
or downstream consequences. Firing decisions are excepted
from the administrative process, full stop. That is true
whether the resulting injury stems from to a constitutional or
statutory violation, perhaps by reflecting discrimination or re-
taliation, or instead is a normal incident of prison life. Because
Anton’s firing of Miles is the action at the crux of the First
Amendment claims, Miles was not required to engage the
grievance process before he turned to federal court.
Beyond the policy’s plain language, it makes practical
sense for a grievance regime to be ordered around actions ra-
ther than the legal theories used to support or oppose them.
When a prisoner encounters an event or action and quickly
must decide whether to file a grievance (recall that Indiana
State Prison provides only ten business days), he cannot be
expected to know how that event will figure into a future suit
brought in federal court. This is not only because prisoners
typically lack legal expertise, but also because legal claims re-
quire time to develop. Miles’s constitutional retaliation claim,
for example, may have taken shape only after he learned from
Officer Nunn and others that Anton had announced that the
firing was pretextual or was based on anti-Muslim bias. In-
deed, administrative grievance processes can help facilitate
fact-finding to illuminate what an officer did and why. See
Woodford v. Ngo, 548 U.S. 81, 95 (2006) (observing that these
processes are valuable because “witnesses can be identified
and questioned while memories are still fresh, and evidence
can be gathered and preserved”). The district court’s

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8 No. 21-2796
distinction between the treatment reflected in Anton’s firing
decision and the firing decision itself assumes that prisoners
will have their legal claims formed at the outset. That puts the
cart before the horse.
If at this point there is any ambiguity remaining, we re-
solve it in Miles’s favor for multiple reasons. First, an official
“must show beyond dispute that remedies were available”
before the court should dismiss on the basis of the affirmative
defense. Ramirez v. Young, 906 F.3d 530, 534 (7th Cir. 2018).
Ambiguous policy language is not beyond dispute by defini-
tion, and so resolving interpretative ambiguity against the of-
ficial goes hand in hand with our practice of placing the
broader burden of proof with the official.
Second, and as the Supreme Court has remarked, the ex-
haustion requirement creates an incentive for prisoners to
make full use of whatever administrative process a prison
chooses to create. This helps managers monitor officer-pris-
oner relations and resolve complaints quickly, and also re-
duces inefficient uses of the federal courts. See Woodford, 548
U.S. at 93–94. But vague or confusing grievance provisions
open to multiple interpretations can sow distrust among pris-
oners and undercut these benefits. See id. at 102 (observing
that effective grievance systems are “perceived by prisoners
as providing … a meaningful opportunity for prisoners to
raise meritorious grievances”). Administrators have broad
leeway to tailor grievance rules to their institutions. If it
wishes to do so, Indiana State Prison is free to amend section
IV to strike a different balance between grievable and non-
grievable issues. But whatever the rules may be, they must be
written clearly if the grievance system is to function predicta-
bly and meaningfully.

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No. 21-2796 9
C
Miles also alleges that he can produce facts that would
show that the grievance process was unavailable to him in
practice. He says that correctional officers had instructed him
not to lodge a grievance after his firing. We need not explore
this, given our reading of the policy. If textualism is for any-
one, it must be for everyone, including those who are incar-
cerated. Because the written policy excepted his case from the
administrative process, Miles had complied with the PLRA’s
exhaustion requirement when he brought his suit in federal
court. We therefore REVERSE and REMAND the case for further
proceedings.

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