Walker v. Price, No. 17-1345 (7th Cir. 2018)
Annotate this CaseWalker, an inmate, brought a civil rights suit against prison officers. Walker asked the court six times to recruit a volunteer lawyer to represent him. The Seventh Circuit held that the court acted within its discretion when it denied his initial motions but abused its discretion when it denied the sixth. A litigant in a civil case has neither a statutory nor a constitutional right to counsel. When the court receives a request to recruit counsel from an indigent plaintiff, it must determine whether the plaintiff has made a reasonable attempt to obtain counsel on his own and whether, given the difficulty of the case, the plaintiff is competent to litigate it himself. This case involves the second question. Walker was facing jury trial by videoconference. That substantially increased the difficulty of his case, despite the simplicity of his claims. The basic competence that Walker had demonstrated during the pretrial phase did not necessarily reflect his ability to handle a video trial entirely on his own. Trying a case requires additional skills, and Walker had managed the pretrial phase with the help of a jailhouse lawyer who had since been transferred to another prison.
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