3rd Circuit Gives Amateur Inmate Litigant a Mulligan – Update for November 7, 2024

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

DO-OVER

Thomas Petoff, a federal prisoner confined to a wheelchair, filed an administrative remedy after he was denied a wheelchair cushion. He said that in retaliation, he was thrown in the Special Housing Unit (SHU), had his wheelchair confiscated, suffered assaults and humiliating treatment, was denied food (including his “religious diet”), medical care, recreation, and law library access, and ultimately lost good-time credits and was fined. He sued.

He threw every claim the jailhouse lawyers in the prison library told him to throw at the defendant. It was a hodgepodge of high-falutin’ legalese used by someone who had no idea what he was doing.

The district court construed Tom’s pro se complaint as raising 1st, 5th, and 8th Amendment claims under Bivens v Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. That wasn’t enough to keep the case from being dismissed with prejudice. For good measure, the Court said Tom’s complaint was barred by Heck v. Humphrey to the extent that his claims undermined disciplinary sanctions.

It was kind of a ‘get out and don’t come back’ dismissal.

Last week, the 3rd Circuit largely agreed on the Bivens and Heck analyses, but held that pro se litigants must be given an opportunity to amend to pursue non-futile statutory theories—here, the Rehabilitation Act and Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As for the Bivens claim, the Circuit ruled that Tom’s allegations failed in light of the Supreme Court’s decision last summer in Goldey v. Fields, that foreclosed Bivens actions for 8th Amendment excessive force claims.

To the extent that Tom’s claims might call into question the validity of the disciplinary proceeding findings that he had violated prison rules, the 3^rd said those claims are barred by the Heck v. Humphrey favorable-termination rule. That rule holds that to recover damages for an allegedly unconstitutional conviction or imprisonment, or for other harm caused by actions whose unlawfulness would render a conviction or sentence invalid, a plaintiff must prove that the conviction or sentence has been reversed on direct appeal, expunged, declared invalid by a state court, or called into question by a federal court on habeas corpus.

However, the Circuit said, Tom got a mulligan on some of his claims. The 3^rd said that the district court failed to address Tom’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Rehabilitation Act claim, as well as his later-clarified RFRA “religious diet” claim. Although Tom did not plead those claims very well, the 3rd said that an amendment cleaning up those claims would not necessarily have been futile. It remanded Tom’s suit to the district court to give him a fair chance to amend.

Petoff v. Delmonico, Case No. 24-2933, 2025 U.S.App. LEXIS 27737 (3d Cir. October 23, 2025)

~ Thomas L. Root