Matthew Griffin v. Nadine Bryant, No. 21-7362 (4th Cir. 2022)
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Plaintiff appealed from the decision rendered in the Eastern District of North Carolina in 2021 granting summary judgment to several officials of North Carolina’s Central Prison (the “Central Prison defendants”), against whom Plaintiff— a Central Prison inmate — pursued various state and federal claims. In awarding judgment to the Central Prison Defendants, the district court ruled that Plaintiff had failed to exhaust all administrative remedies available to him prior to filing his lawsuit in federal court, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (the “PLRA”).
The Fourth Circuit vacated and remanded. The court explained that in these circumstances, however, the record presents numerous disputed issues of material fact about how North Carolina’s prison grievance procedure functions and is administered, including whether Plaintiff failed to exhaust administrative remedies of his own accord and whether such remedies were meaningfully “available” to him. Accordingly, because the district court’s award of summary judgment was erroneously premature and otherwise flawed.
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