Taylor v. Stevens, et al.

Davariol Taylor was retaliated against and sexually assaulted in prison after he attempted to hold prison medical staff accountable for the overdose death of another man at the facility. Despite the seriousness of Mr. Taylor’s allegations, the district court threw out his case after erroneously concluding that Mr. Taylor had received three “strikes” under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), barring him from proceeding “in forma pauperis.” The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting to overturn the district court’s decision and ensure that courts don’t misconstrue the PLRA’s three-strikes provision to deny incarcerated people their day in court.

During July of 2024, medical staff at Marquette Branch Prison gave Mr. Taylor and another man at the prison the wrong medication, causing the other man to overdose and die. When Mr. Taylor sought to report what had happened, officers retaliated against him, and soon after a prison doctor sexually assaulted him while he was handcuffed during a teeth cleaning. Mr. Taylor brought a lawsuit in federal court, seeking relief for these abuses. Being indigent, Mr. Taylor sought permission to proceed in forma pauperis, which would allow him to pay the civil filing fees in monthly installments rather than up front.

However, the district court denied that permission and dismissed Mr. Taylor’s suit, concluding that he was a “three-strikes” litigant under the PLRA. Enacted in 1996, the PLRA generally prohibits incarcerated plaintiffs from filing lawsuits in forma pauperis if they have had three or more prior cases dismissed as frivolous, malicious, or failing to state a claim. Mr. Taylor had two prior cases that met that condition. But the district court wrongly concluded that two other cases that had been dismissed as barred by Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity also constituted “strikes,” contrary to binding Sixth Circuit precedent. And then when Mr. Taylor appealed the district court’s dismissal, the district court issued a post-appeal order in which it abandoned those two strike designations—apparently recognizing that they conflicted with binding caselaw—and instead identified a different prior case as Mr. Taylor’s third strike. But that case was also not a strike under the PLRA’s plain text and Sixth Circuit precedent: although some of Mr. Taylor’s claims were dismissed for failing to state a claim, the court found that he had validly stated several other claims, which it permitted to proceed to discovery before ultimately granting summary judgment against him on a procedural ground (failure to exhaust administrative remedies).

The MacArthur Justice Center has taken up Mr. Taylor’s case on appeal to urge the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to correct the district court’s error and ensure that future district courts apply the PLRA’s three-strikes provision as written, not with invented hurdles that have no place in the text Congress enacted.