Bridges v. Dart et al

Filing 36

ORDER. Signed by the Honorable Manish S. Shah on 4/17/2017: Defendants' motion to dismiss, 31 , is granted. The amended complaint is dismissed without prejudice. Plaintiff will be given one more opportunity to replead his claims. Any amended c omplaint must be filed by May 8, 2017. If no amended complaint is filed, this dismissal will automatically convert to a dismissal with prejudice and the case will be terminated. [For further detail see attached order.] Status hearing on 4/20/17 is stricken and reset to 5/23/17 at 9:30 a.m. Notices mailed. (psm, )

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION
KENYATTA BRIDGES,
Plaintiff,

No. 16 CV 4635

v.

Judge Manish S. Shah

THOMAS J. DART, Sheriff of Cook
County, and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, a
municipal corporation,
Defendants.
ORDER

Defendants’ motion to dismiss, [31], is granted. The amended complaint is
dismissed without prejudice. Plaintiff will be given one more opportunity to replead
his claims. Any amended complaint must be filed by May 8, 2017. If no amended
complaint is filed, this dismissal will automatically convert to a dismissal with
prejudice and the case will be terminated.
STATEMENT
Defendants the Sheriff of Cook County, Cook County, and unknown sheriff’s
employees move to dismiss plaintiff Kenyatta Bridges’s amended complaint under
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6). [30].1 Bridges’s original complaint against
these defendants was dismissed without prejudice because he failed to state a claim
and because his claim against unknown employees was time-barred. [27].
Bridges was allowed to replead. His amended complaint alleges that while
detained at the Cook County Jail, Bridges notified personnel that he needed to sleep
in a lower bunk but was denied a lower bunk. After his warnings, he was injured in
April 2014 after falling off an upper bunk. Bridges alleges that his injury was a
product of a widespread practice at the jail of ignoring detainees’ requests for a
lower bunk. [29] ¶ 16. He cites to five lawsuits brought by other Cook County Jail
detainees who alleged they had prescriptions for a lower bunk that went unfilled
during various instances from 2005 to 2012. Bridges also alleges that he was not
regularly provided with his prescribed medication while at the jail, and that this
1

Bracketed numbers are entries on the district court docket.

resulted from the county and the Sheriff’s widespread practice of failing to provide
detainees with their prescribed medication on a timely basis. He does not allege
when he was prescribed medications, for what condition, when the medications
were denied or delayed, or what injury he suffered as a result.
To survive a motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure
12(b)(6), a complaint must contain factual allegations that plausibly suggest a right
to relief. Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 677–78 (2009). The court must construe all
factual allegations as true and draw all reasonable inferences in the plaintiffs’
favor, but the court need not accept legal conclusions or conclusory allegations. Id.
at 678–79. Defendants move to dismiss Bridges’s amended complaint, arguing that
he has failed to state a Monell claim against a widespread practice of denying
detainees a lower bunk and that his new Monell claim about medication is timebarred.2
A Monell claim requires showing that a government policy or custom was the
“moving force” behind the constitutional deprivation. Teesdale v. City of Chicago,
690 F.3d 829, 833 (7th Cir. 2012). A plaintiff can establish a “policy or custom” by
showing: (1) an express policy; (2) a widespread practice that is so permanent and
well settled as to constitute a custom or usage; or (3) that the constitutional injury
was caused by a person with final policymaking authority. Id. at 834. Bridges
pursues the “widespread practice” theory and therefore “must allege facts that
permit the reasonable inference that the practice is so widespread so as to
constitute a governmental custom.” Gill v. City of Milwaukee, 850 F.3d 335, 344 (7th
Cir. 2017). “[I]solated acts of misconduct will not suffice; a series of violations must
be presented to lay the premise of deliberate indifference.” Palmer v. Marion Cty.,
327 F.3d 588, 596 (7th Cir. 2003). The alleged practice, although not authorized by
written law or express municipal policy, must be “so permanent and well settled as
to constitute a ‘custom or usage’ with the force of law.” City of St. Louis v.
Praprotnik, 485 U.S. 112, 127 (1988).
Citing to Johnson v. Sheriff of Cook County, No. 15 C 741, 2015 WL 1942724
(N.D. Ill. Apr. 24, 2015), defendants contend that a widespread practice cannot be
alleged by referring to other cases alleging similar treatment by the same
institutional defendant. Defendants argue that it would be improper to rely on the

Bridges’s original complaint included a non-Monell deliberate indifference claim against
the Sheriff and unknown employees, which was dismissed. [27]. Those allegations
reappeared in the amended complaint, but Bridges’s response brief only focuses on his
Monell claims. To the extent Bridges intended to replead a (non-Monell) deliberate
indifference claim against the Sheriff and unknown employees for failing to assign him a
lower bunk, it fails for the same reasons as stated in the prior order. [27] at 2.
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other cases cited by Bridges because they involved unsubstantiated allegations and
ultimately ended up being dismissed or settled.
Johnson, however, merely held that a cursory reference to a widespread
practice as alleged in another case was insufficient to state a Monell claim above a
speculative level when the complaint lacked an explanation of that widespread
practice or specific factual allegations against the sheriff’s office. 2015 WL 1942724
at *2. Here, Bridges has alleged other instances of low bunk denials to show the
jail’s practice through a series of violations.
The unsubstantiated nature of the allegations in these other lawsuits is not a
reason to discount them. At the motion to dismiss stage, most (if not all) allegations
are unsubstantiated—their veracity is determined at a later stage in litigation. In
widespread practice cases, “[i]f the same problem has arisen many times and the
municipality has acquiesced in the outcome, it is possible (though not necessary) to
infer that there is a policy at work, not the kind of isolated incident that [the
Supreme Court] held cannot support municipal liability.” Calhoun v. Ramsey, 408
F.3d 375, 380 (7th Cir. 2005). Bridges’s allegations that several other detainees’
were prescribed lower bunks, but denied them may be sufficient to allow the
plausible inference that there was a widespread practice at the jail to deny lower
bunk access to detainees despite prescriptions or orders for such bunks.
But the problem for Bridges is that he has alleged a different practice—his
allegation is that his request for a lower bunk was denied. Although he uses the
word “prescriptions” in reference to his own requests, [29] ¶ 6, he does not allege
that he was actually prescribed a lower bunk by a medical professional. His claim
that there was a policy of flouting requests by detainees is belied by his allegations
that other detainees received prescriptions. In other words, it is apparent from the
complaint that some detainees’ requests were not flouted, but received attention in
the form of medical prescriptions for lower bunks. This internal inconsistency in the
complaint makes Bridges’s Monell claim implausible. Moreover, any practice of not
fulfilling medically prescribed lower bunks was not at issue for Bridges, because he
alleges no such prescription in his amended complaint. Without an allegation that
Bridges had a prescription for a lower bunk, it is not reasonable to infer that a
practice of not honoring prescriptions was a cause of Bridges’s injury. Bridges’s
Monell claim as it relates to his fall is dismissed.
Bridges’s lower-bunk claim alleges that he fell out of his bunk and was
injured in April 2014. Under the two-year statute of limitations for § 1983
deliberate indifference claims in Illinois, the statute of limitations on his lowerbunk claim passed in April 2016. As explained in the earlier dismissal of Bridges’s
original complaint, an amendment after April 2016 to identify unnamed sheriff’s
employees who denied him a lower bunk would be untimely. [27] at 2. But Bridges’s
Monell claim based on the denial of medication is a different claim—the statute of
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limitations accrual is tied to the injury sustained from the denial of medication, not
to the April 2014 fall from an upper bunk. The amended complaint, however, is
silent on when Bridges was denied medication. (The complaint also does not allege
the length of his detention at the jail.) Bridges’s medication claim may very well be
untimely, because it does not relate back to Bridges’s original complaint. An
amendment relates back if it asserts a claim that arose out of the conduct,
transaction, or occurrence set out in the original pleading. Fed. R. Civ. P. 15(c).
Bridges’s medication claim arises out of a new set of alleged facts and conduct not
alleged in his original complaint, which was limited to denial of a lower bunk.
If the medication claim accrued before January 18, 2015, and no tolling
applies, it is too late to pursue. But the untimeliness of this new claim is not
apparent on the face of the complaint and therefore dismissal on that basis is not
appropriate at this time. A complaint will be dismissed for failure to comply with
the statute of limitations only where the allegations of the complaint itself set forth
everything necessary to satisfy the affirmative defense. Chicago Bldg. Design, P.C.
v. Mongolian House, Inc., 770 F.3d 610, 613–14 (7th Cir. 2014).
Bridges’s failure to allege what his medications-denial claim entails (when it
occurred, what medications were at issue, and how the denial or delay of
medications affected him) makes it too vague to be discernible. Although defendants
have not raised this challenge to the adequacy of the pleading, the defects are
evident from the complaint and suitable for a sua sponte dismissal. See Diedrich v.
Ocwen Loan Servicing, LLC, 839 F.3d 583, 588 n.3 (7th Cir. 2016) (citing Ledford v.
Sullivan, 105 F.3d 354, 356 (7th Cir. 1997)). Complaints need not plead evidence
and need only make allegations sufficient to state a plausible claim for relief, but
Bridges’s statement that he did not consistently receive unidentified medications for
an unidentified ailment, see [29] ¶ 19, is too thin to give notice to defendants of a
constitutional violation. There is no allegation of an objectively serious medical
condition for which Bridges was deprived treatment.
The amended complaint is dismissed without prejudice. Bridges will be given
one more opportunity to replead—to clarify his claims and provide sufficient notice
to defendants. If Bridges does not submit an amended complaint, the dismissal will
automatically convert to a dismissal with prejudice and the case will be terminated.
ENTER:
___________________________
Manish S. Shah
United States District Judge

Date: 4/17/2017

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