9th Circuit tolls prisoner’s civil rights claims

Filed 7h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Canon in D Major

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Meissen Manufactory · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Ninth Circuit ruled that an Oregon federal court wrongly threw out a prisoner's civil rights lawsuit as filed too late. The man alleges correctional officers denied him a decontamination shower after pepper spray got into his skin and lungs.

He filed after the standard two-year window closed, but the appeals court found that time spent completing the mandatory prison grievance process, required by federal law before he could even sue, should not have counted against him. Oregon law allows exactly this kind of pause when another law blocks a plaintiff from filing sooner.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A system that makes you file a grievance before you can sue, then almost let the clock run out on you for doing it, is the kind of arithmetic only a bureaucracy could love. The appeals court caught it this time. Whether the underlying pepper spray claim ever gets its day is still an open question, and a slower one.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Canon in D Major · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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