Hardy v. Illinois Department of Corrections et al

Filing 16

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that Plaintiff's amended complaint (Doc. 10) is DISMISSED without prejudice for failure to abide by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8. IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that, in order to proceed with this action, Plaintiff is DIRECTED to submit his Second Amended Complaint within 35 days of the entry of this order. (Amended Pleadings due by 9/2/2015). Signed by Judge J. Phil Gilbert on 7/29/2015. (tjk)

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
NEDRICK HARDY, SR.,
Plaintiff,
vs.
ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT
OF CORRECTIONS,
GOVERNOR PAT QUINN,
SALVADOR GODINEZ,
WEXFORD HEALTH SOURCES, INC.,
KIMBERLY BUTLER,
DOCTOR TROST,
DOCTOR BAIG,
AMY LANE,
INTERNAL AFFAIRS UNIT,
JOHN DOE #1,
JOHN DOE #2,
BETSY SPILLER, and
COUNSELOR PRICE,
Defendants.

)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)

Case No. 3:15-cv-00437-JPG

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER
GILBERT, District Judge:
On April 20, 2015, Plaintiff Nedrick Hardy, Sr., filed a one-hundred-sixty-five
paragraph-long complaint pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against a number of state officials
throughout Illinois, raising a litany of claims about what happened to him and other inmates
during Hardy’s tenure at Menard. (Doc. 1.) Hardy’s complaint was lengthy and difficult to
parse, so on May 6, 2015, the Court ordered Hardy to file an amended complaint splitting his
pleading into separate counts. (Doc. 6.) For his amended complaint, the Court also told Hardy
to keep his entire pleading clear, concise, and focused on his experiences at Menard: he was
directed to state the “when, where, how, and by whom” his rights were violated, was cautioned
Page 1 of 10

against using “non-specific, vague allegations of fact,” and was ordered to “concisely state the
facts that support” his claims. (Id. at 3.) On June 2, 2015, Hardy asked for more time to file his
amended complaint, and the Court granted his request. (Doc. 8.) On June 30, 2015, Hardy filed
his amended complaint, along with a motion to certify his case as a class action. (Docs. 9 & 10.)
Before a prisoner’s complaint can be served on the defendants named in his suit and the
case can proceed, 28 U.S.C. § 1915A requires district courts to review a prisoner’s complaint
and “identify cognizable claims or dismiss the complaint, or any portion of the complaint” if the
complaint “is frivolous, malicious, or fails to state a claim on which relief may be granted” or if
it “seeks monetary relief from a defendant who is immune from such relief.” Here, the form of
Hardy’s amended complaint makes a review of it unworkable, as the complaint flouts Rule 8.
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8 compels litigants to file a “short and plain statement of
the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” This requirement of brevity fosters two
goals: it allows trial courts to speed a case to resolution and it allows a defendant to capably
respond to the allegations in the complaint. United States ex rel. Garst v. Lockheed-Martin
Corp., 328 F.3d 374, 378 (7th Cir. 2003). While a minor amount of surplus material in a
complaint is not enough to frustrate these goals and violate Rule 8, unnecessary length coupled
with repetitiveness, needless complexity, and immaterial allegations can push a complaint past
Rule 8’s breaking point – in other words, it can make a “complaint unintelligible” by “scattering
and concealing in a morass of irrelevancies the few allegations that matter.” Kadamovas v.
Stevens, 706 F.3d 843, 844 (7th Cir. 2013). When faced with that type of pleading, district
judges have the power to dismiss the complaint and require a redo. Id.
Hardy’s complaint does not have a minor amount of surplusage, but instead has the kind
of repetition, length, and discussion of irrelevant material that violates Rule 8. Hardy seeks to
Page 2 of 10

raise fourteen claims in this case, but his complaint consists of two-hundred-and-fifty paragraphs
spread over ninety pages (closer to one-hundred-and-eighty pages when you take into account
that Hardy’s complaint is single spaced).

Those ninety pages are chock full of repetitive

allegations: Hardy’s claim for overcrowding, for example, discusses the heat problems at the
prison, and those allegations are repeated again and again for other claims in his case. Those
ninety pages are also filled to the brim with irrelevant material: Hardy’s repeat references to
“inmates” generally and his insistence on pleading facts about what happened to every person at
Menard leaves the complaint full of allegations that seemingly have nothing to do with Hardy’s
personal experiences at Menard. In all, Hardy’s shotgun-style complaint leaves this Court with
the task of “read[ing] and decipher[ing] [a] tome[] disguised [as a] pleading[],” a task that district
courts “should not have” to do. Lindell v. Houser, 442 F.3d 1033, 1034 n.1 (7th Cir. 2006); see
also Garst, 328 F.3d at 378 (“Rule 8(a) requires parties to make their pleadings straightforward,
so that judges and adverse parties need not try to fish a gold coin from a bucket of mud.”).
Hardy might argue that the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in Kadamovas v. Stevens swings
against dismissal of his complaint, but he would be wrong. For one, Kadamovas reaffirmed the
right of a district judge to dismiss a complaint that “is so long that it imposes an undue burden on
the judge, to the prejudice of other litigants seeking the judge’s attention.” 706 F.3d at 844.
Moreover, while Kadamovas recognized complaints may be bulkier if more claims are asserted,
that case dealt with a twenty-eight page long complaint that asserted almost ten claims. Id. In
evaluating that complaint, the Seventh Circuit generally observed that district judges can
“require that complaints be cut down to size,” but went on to hold that no trimming was
necessary in that case because twenty-eight pages was not egregiously long to plead ten claims.
See id. Here, Hardy brings fourteen claims spread over ninety single-spaced pages. He does not
Page 3 of 10

need that much space to make out those claims, and numerous circuits have found that Hardy’s
type of verbose complaint violates Rule 8. See, e.g., Harrison v. Bd. of Regents of Univ. Sys. of
Georgia, 519 F. App’x 641, 643 (11th Cir. 2013) (eighty-two page complaint that took a
“shotgun” approach to asserting claims violated Rule 8); Antoine v. Ramos, 497 F. App’x 631,
635 (7th Cir. 2012) (seventy-five page prisoner complaint asserting disparate claims “fail[ed] to
comply with the short and plain statement” requirement); Cody v. Loen, 468 F. App’x 644, 645
(8th Cir. 2012) (seventy-five page prisoner complaint containing 246 paragraphs with “unrelated
or overlapping” claims violated Rule 8); Hoffenberg v. Bumb, 446 F. App’x 394, 396 (3d Cir.
2011) (one-hundred page repetitive complaint was “neither short nor plain”); Rueb v. Zavaras,
371 F. App’x 982, 986 (10th Cir. 2010) (ninety-five page complaint that discussed claims linked
to other individuals and often “failed to mention a specific time, place, or person involved with
the alleged offenses” violated Rule 8); Garst, 328 F.3d at 378 (155-page double-spaced
complaint with numerous attachments was “pestilential” and violated Rule 8).
Because Hardy’s complaint violates Rule 8, his complaint must be dismissed, and he
must file an amended complaint that trims his complaint down to a manageable size. To keep his
complaint within the letter of Rule 8, the Court will offer Hardy three points of guidance. First, a
number of Hardy’s claims are fruitless as a matter of law. For example, Hardy takes issue with
the prison’s decision to charge co-pays to prisoners, but a co-pay practice alone does not violate
any constitutional safeguards. See Poole v. Isaacs, 703 F.3d 1024, 1027 (7th Cir. 2012) (“[T]he
imposition of a modest fee for medical services, standing alone, does not violate the
Constitution.”). In addition, Hardy complains that supervisory staff at Wexford and Menard
failed to follow several of their own internal rules, but a mere failure to follow administrative
rules does not itself state a constitutional claim. See, e.g., Fuller v. Dillon, 236 F.3d 876, 880
Page 4 of 10

(7th Cir. 2001) (“[I]t is important to note that the failure of the prison officials to follow state
administrative rules is not a denial, in and of itself, of one’s due process rights.”); Rascon v.
Hardiman, 803 F.2d 269, 273 (7th Cir. 1986) (“[I]t is not sufficient for a section 1983 plaintiff to
show that a supervisory official was remiss in supervising the implementation of a policy in
force in an institution.”) There are likely other defective claims, but the length and repetition in
Hardy’s complaint makes a full evaluation of his claims nearly impossible. The Court only
mentions these defects to guide Hardy in trimming down some of the fat in his complaint.
Second, for reasons the Court cannot fathom, Hardy seems to have bent over backwards
to try to yoke high-level officials and departments into his complaint, rather than focus on the
individuals who were directly involved in his claims at Menard. He should consider leaving
some of these defendants out of his next complaint. For instance, the Illinois Department of
Corrections is not a proper defendant in a Section 1983 suit, so naming it – and including
allegations against it – is futile and merely adds bulk to his pleading. Dobbey v. Illinois Dep’t of
Corr., 574 F.3d 443, 444 (7th Cir. 2009). Former Governor Quinn, too, is not a proper defendant
– the Seventh Circuit has held that high-level officials like governors have no place in a prisoner
suit when they had no real involvement in the case beyond knowledge from media sources or
letters from prisoners about the underlying claim. See Burks v. Raemisch, 555 F.3d 592, 595
(7th Cir. 2009) (rejecting view that “everyone who knows about a prisoner’s problem must pay
damages,” as that view would encompass liability when a prisoner wrote “letters to the Governor
of Wisconsin and 999 other public officials”). That is all Hardy alleges in this case for Quinn, so
leaving him out would speed his rewrite along.

There may be others – Butler and Godinez’s

link to some of his claims seems tenuous at best – but again a full airing is impossible given the
length and character of Hardy’s complaint. It is enough to say that Hardy would file a far less
Page 5 of 10

confusing complaint if he would plead, in a straightforward fashion, who was personally
involved in his medical care issues, who was personally involved in his failure to protect issues,
who was personally involved in his conditions of confinement, and so on. Trying to rope in
high-level officials to all of his claims through vague and conclusory allegations gets him
nowhere. See Patton v. Przybyiski, 822 F.2d 697, 701 (7th Cir. 1987) (“[T]he courts insist that
plaintiffs who want to bring a head of department into a federal civil rights case [must] plead his
involvement with greater specificity than [boilerplate allegations of personal involvement].”).
Finally, Hardy has spilled a great deal of ink by drafting a sweeping missive about the
experiences of every inmate at Menard, routinely alleging violations of rights that happened to
“inmates” at Menard generally. This type of pleading has filled Hardy’s complaint with largely
irrelevant material that seemingly has nothing to do with the injuries or events that Hardy has
experienced. To be sure, Hardy wants to file this case as a class complaint, and if he can satisfy
all of the requirements for class certification the case may well be certified. But class complaints
do not need to include specific and lengthy allegations about the experiences of every member of
the class. At least at this stage of the case, it is enough for Hardy to plead what happened to him
that violated the United States Constitution and who did it. If other inmates experienced a
similar deprivation, he can simply allege that similarly-situated inmates were also harmed.1
As he drafts his amended complaint, Hardy should also be mindful of Federal Rule of
Civil Procedure 20. Rule 20 allows a plaintiff to join as many defendants as he wants in one
action so long as “any right to relief is asserted against them jointly, severally, or in the
1

An example might be helpful. Hardy says that one of his claims concerns the denial of medical
care at the prison. For that claim, Hardy only needs to lay out – in chronological order – the
facts that show how a particular defendant was deliberately indifferent to Hardy’s own medical
needs. If he focuses on a simple chronological account of what happened to him and who did it,
his complaint will be far easier to understand, far less duplicative, and far less confusing. And
with those defects fixed, the Court can evaluate his complaint and the defendants can respond.
Page 6 of 10

alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of
transaction or occurrences” and “any question of law or fact common to all defendant will arise
in the action.” FED. R. CIV. P. 20(a)(2). What a prisoner cannot do under Rule 20 is join
unrelated claims against separate groups of defendants in one suit — a “litigant cannot throw all
of his grievances, against dozens of different parties, into one stewpot.” Wheeler v. Wexford
Health Sources, Inc., 689 F.3d 680, 683 (7th Cir. 2012). This barrier against multi-defendant,
multi-claim suits avoids the procedural “morass” that comes with these types of cases, and also
ensures that prisoners pay necessary filing fees and incur strikes as envisioned by the Prison
Litigation Reform Act. George v. Smith, 507 F.3d 605, 607 (7th Cir. 2007). Here, Hardy brings
claims linked to conditions at the prison, failure to protect by officers, and medical care (among
others). To the extent some of Hardy’s claims are directed at discrete groups of defendants, he
should restrict his amended complaint to claims against one group of defendants, and raise
unrelated claims against other groups in another suit. If he violates Rule 20 in his amended
complaint, defendants may be dismissed as misjoined or claims may be severed sua sponte.
One closing note is in order concerning the motions that Hardy recently filed with the
Court. Hardy has filed three motions for preliminary injunctions as of late, asking the Court to
issue orders to compel prison officials to provide better toothbrushes and dental care, to provide
fans and improve the ventilation and heat issues at the prison, to provide adequate medical care,
to provide protection to unspecified inmates from officers at the prison, to provide access to
exercise, and to provide access to the courts. At this time, Hardy does not have a viable
complaint, so the entry of a preliminary injunction would be improper. E.g., Bell v. Hood, 327
U.S. 678, 681-82 (1946); Greater Chicago Combine & Ctr., Inc. v. City of Chicago, 431 F.3d
1065, 1069-70 (7th Cir. 2005). Once more, the entry of a preliminary injunction requires a
Page 7 of 10

probability of success on the merits of an action, a probability that Hardy lacks (at least at this
time) because his complaint is being dismissed. St. Hilaire v. Arizona Dep’t of Corr., 936 F.2d
579 (9th Cir. 1991).

Since Hardy is being given another opportunity to file an amended

complaint for this case, the Court will hold his preliminary motions in abeyance rather than
dismiss them outright. Once the Court receives Hardy’s amended complaint, the complaint (and
any attendant motions) will be reviewed pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1915A.
Disposition
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that Plaintiff’s amended complaint (Doc. 10) is
DISMISSED without prejudice for failure to abide by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8.
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that, in order to proceed with this action, Plaintiff is
DIRECTED to submit his Second Amended Complaint within 35 days of the entry of this order
(on or before September 2, 2015). He should label the form Second Amended Complaint, and he
should use the case number for this action. The amended complaint shall split each of Plaintiff’s
claims into separate counts, labeled Count 1, Count 2, and so on. For example, Count 1 could
address all of the conditions that Hardy has been exposed to at Menard that he finds
objectionable (overcrowding, heat, ventilation, access to necessities, inadequate shelter, denial of
exercise, etc.); Count 2 could address indifference to Hardy’s medical needs; Count 3 could
address access to courts; Count 4 could address any failure to protect; Count 5 could address
discriminatory treatment among cell houses; and so on. For each count, Plaintiff should state, in
chronological order, what happened to him that constituted a deprivation of his constitutional
rights, and who was personally involved. Plaintiff should avoid repetitive factual allegations and
keep his allegations clear and concise. He should also avoid lengthy introductions to each of his
claims which put forth material relevant to inmates generally at Menard, and instead focus on
Page 8 of 10

what happened to him at Menard. To the extent Plaintiff wishes to make class allegations, he
can indicate that his own deprivations extend to other similarly-situated inmates.
An amended complaint supersedes the original complaint, rendering the original
complaint void. See Flannery v. Recording Indus. Ass’n of Am., 354 F.3d 632, 638 n.1 (7th Cir.
2004). The Court will not accept piecemeal amendments to a complaint. Thus, the Second
Amended Complaint must stand on its own, without reference to any other pleading. Should the
Second Amended Complaint not conform to these requirements, it shall be stricken. Plaintiff
must also re-file any exhibits he wishes the Court to consider along with the Second Amended
Complaint. Failure to file an amended complaint shall result in the dismissal of this action with
prejudice. Such dismissal shall count as one of Plaintiff’s three allotted “strikes” within the
meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g). No service shall be ordered on any Defendant until after the
Court completes its § 1915A review of the Second Amended Complaint.
In order to assist Plaintiff in preparing his amended complaint, the CLERK is
DIRECTED to mail Plaintiff a blank civil rights complaint form.
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Plaintiff’s motion to certify class (Doc. 9) and
motions for preliminary injunctive relief (Docs. 12-14) are held in ABEYANCE pending receipt
of Plaintiff’s Second Amended Complaint.
Plaintiff is ADVISED that he is under a continuing obligation to keep the Clerk of Court
and each opposing party informed of any change in his address; the Court will not independently
investigate his whereabouts. This shall be done in writing and not later than 7 days after a
transfer or other change in address occurs. Failure to comply with this order will cause a delay
in the transmission of court documents and may result in dismissal of this action for want of
prosecution. See FED. R. CIV. P. 41(b).
Page 9 of 10

IT IS SO ORDERED.
DATED: July 29, 2015
s/J. Phil Gilbert
J. Phil Gilbert
United States District Judge

Page 10 of 10