McLaurin v. Dart et al

Filing 6

MEMORANDUM Order. Signed by the Honorable Milton I. Shadur on 1/31/2017:Mailed notice(clw, )

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION

ANTONIO E. MCLAURIN,
Plaintiff,
v.
TOM DART,
Defendant.

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Case No. 17 C 630

MEMORANDUM ORDER
Antonio McLaurin ("McLaurin") has used the Clerk's-Office-supplied form of "Complaint
Under the Civil Rights Act, Title 42 Section 1983" to charge Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart with
a violation of McLaurin's constitutional rights while he was detained at the Cook County
Department of Corrections ("County Jail") during a period of some six months between March and
September 2015. Although this Court will of course credit McLaurin's Complaint ¶ IV
"Statement of Claim" in which he asserts that he was subjected to terrible living conditions "in
Division One B-3 and E-4" during that time frame, this action must be and is dismissed because of
McLaurin's total failure to show any compliance with the precondition to suit established by
42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a):
No action shall be brought with respect to prison conditions under section 1983 of
this title, or any other Federal law, by a prisoner confined to any jail, prison, or
other correctional facility until such administrative remedies as are available are
exhausted.
In that respect nothing in McLaurin's Complaint states or even hints at any predicate for his
noncompliance with that requirement.
As is often the case with prisoner actions such as McLaurin's, he has accompanied his

Complaint with another Clerk's-Office-supplied form -- an In Forma Pauperis Application (the
"Application," Dkt. No. 3). 1 That Application is inadequate to the purpose for which it is
supplied as called for by 28 U.S.C. § 1915 ("Section 1915"), because its attached printout of
transactions in McLaurin's trust fund account at Sheridan Correctional Center (where he has been
in custody since his transfer from the County Jail and then Stateville Correctional Center) ends
with December 16, 2015 even though the "mailbox rule" established by Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S.
266 (1988) calls for a six-month period ending January 24, 2017.
This Court has asked that its law clerk or one of the District Court's staff attorneys assigned
to prisoner cases get the missing information in that regard. When that is received, this Court can
then make the calculation under Section 1915 as to McLaurin's obligation to make future
installment payments toward the $350 filing fee that he has incurred by bringing his Complaint.

__________________________________________
Milton I. Shadur
Senior United States District Judge
Date: January 31, 2017

1

Although the docket also lists a Motion for Attorney Representation as Dkt. No. 4, that
docket number is simply a second counterpart of the Application. That has all of the earmarks of
a glitch in the Clerk's Office, but that is irrelevant because such a motion would be denied as moot
in any event -- and it is.
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