Ravenwood-Alexander v. Beahm et al

Filing 24

ORDER signed by Judge Pamela Pepper on 6/27/2017 DENYING 19 Plaintiff's Motion to Compel. (cc: all counsel, via mail to Plaintiff at Green Bay Correctional Institution) (cb)

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF WISCONSIN
______________________________________________________________________________
SHAUN-THORSKRIEGER RAVENWOOD-ALEXANDER,
Plaintiff,
v.

Case No. 17-cv-7-pp

JOSEPH BEAHM, SEAN M. BRYAN,
RANDALL S. BOUZEK, GABRIEL UMENTUM,
TODD R. OLIG, JESSIE J. SCHNEIDER,
ANN M. SLINGER, AND JANE DOE,
Defendants.
______________________________________________________________________________
ORDER DENYING PLAINTIFF’S MOTION TO COMPEL (DKT. NO. 19)
______________________________________________________________________________
The plaintiff is a Wisconsin state prisoner representing himself. He has
filed a motion to compel the Department of Corrections to give him “documents
received thru mail pertaining to discovery.” Dkt. No. 19 at 1. The court will
deny the plaintiff’s motion.
On February 16, 2017, Magistrate Judge David E. Jones screened the
plaintiff’s complaint under 28 U.S.C. §1915A. Dkt. No. 11. Judge Jones allowed
the plaintiff to proceed on the following claims, based on the plaintiff’s
allegations that that defendants violated his constitutional rights on May 24,
2015, while incarcerated at the Waupun Correctional Institution: (1)
defendants Beahm and Schneider allegedly used excessive force against the
plaintiff in violation of the Eighth Amendment by pepper-spraying him without
justification; (2) defendants Beahm, Umentum, Olig, Bouzek, Bryan, and
Schneider allegedly violated the plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment rights by failing
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to decontaminate him of the pepper spray; (3) defendants Beahm, Umentum,
Olig, Bouzek, Bryan, Doe, and Schneider allegedly violated the plaintiff Eighth
Amendment rights by using excessive force and/or failing to intervene in the
excessive force when the plaintiff was slammed onto the stairs and beaten; (4)
defendants Beahm, Umentum, Olig, Bouzek, Bryan, Schneider, and Doe
allegedly violated the plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment rights by conducting,
participating in, and otherwise watching him be subjected to a manual staffassisted strip search without justification and for the purpose of humiliating
him; (5) defendant Slinger allegedly violated the plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment
rights, and his rights under Wisconsin state law, by failing to treat his
apparent injuries and claiming that he was “fine”; and (6) defendants Beham,
Umentum, Olig, Bouzek, Bryan, Schneider, and Doe allegedly violated the
plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment rights by placing him in a cell naked with no
property or running water for nine hours, knowing that he still had a
substantial amount of pepper spray on him, and by failing to clean the cell
which was still contaminated with pepper spray. Dkt. No. 11 at 3-4.
I.

Plaintiff’s Motion to Compel
In his motion to compel, the plaintiff states that staff at Green Bay

Correctional Institution, where he is currently confined, issued a notice of nondelivery pertaining to thirty-three pages of internet material on “chemical
agents” that he received in the mail. Dkt. No. 19 at 1. The plaintiff states that
this material relates to the chemical agents used on him on May 24, 2015, and
that it is relevant to his claims. Id. According to the plaintiff, institution staff
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will not allow him to have the material because it “poses a threat to security.”
Id. The plaintiff doesn’t think that the material poses a threat to security,
because it merely provides “an informative background on the Chemical
Agents.” Id. at 1-2. He asks the court to order Department of Corrections and
the Warden at the Green Bay Correctional Institution to allow him to have the
documents. Id. at 2.
The defendants have responded that the court should deny the motion,
because he never has served them with discovery demands and because he
failed to certify that he contacted counsel to attempt to resolve the dispute
before filing his motion to compel. Dkt. No. 20.
II.

Discussion
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(a)(1) allows a party to file a motion to

compel the opposing party to produce discovery. Rule 37(a)(3)(A) says that a
party may file such a motion if the other side “fail[ed] to make a disclosure
required by Rule 26(a);” Rule 37(a)(3)(B) says that a party may file such a
motion if that party is seeking discovery if the other side, among other things,
“fail[ed] to answer an interrogatory,” or “fail[ed] to produce documents . . . .”
So—Rule 37 assumes that the party seeking the motion to compel has asked
the other side to disclose or produce certain documents, and that the other
side has not complied with that request.
The plaintiff never has filed a request asking defendants Beahm, Bryan,
Bouzek, Umentum, Olig, Schneider, or Slinger to give him internet documents
relating to chemical agents. Because the plaintiff has not asked the defendants
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in this case to provide such documents in discovery, there is no basis for the
court to order these defendants to produce such documents now.
Further, the plaintiff did not ask the court to compel the defendants to
produce these documents. He asked the court to compel the Department of
Corrections and the warden of the Green Bay Correctional Institution—neither
of whom is a defendant in this case—to give him these documents. The court
has no basis for ordering non-parties to produce documents.
As far as the court can tell, someone outside the prison system mailed
the thirty-three pages of internet printouts to the plaintiff. The court does not
know who mailed those documents to the plaintiff, but it wasn’t the
defendants, and that means that the documents are not “discovery”—
“discovery” is information that is exchanged between the parties to the case. It
appears that these documents were mailed to the plaintiff in regular inmate
mail (not mail between the parties, or between the court and the plaintiff). The
court will not interfere with the Green Bay Correctional Institution’s security
decisions about what outside mail it will and will not allow inmates to receive
from individuals who are not parties to the case.
The court DENIES the plaintiff’s motion to compel. Dkt. No. 19.
Dated in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this 27th day of June, 2017.
BY THE COURT:
________________________________________
HON. PAMELA PEPPER
United States District Judge

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