01-2182 Gladney v. Pendleton Correctional Facility

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“Usually suits are dismissed as frivolous because there is absolutely no legal basis for the plaintiff’s claim. Sometimes, however, a suit is dismissed because the facts alleged in the complaint are so nutty (‘delusional’ is the polite word) that they’re unbelievable, even though there has been no evidentiary hearing to determine their truth or falsity. … That was the basis of the dismissal here. The complaint alleges that on numerous occasions over a span of three years unnamed guards at three different prisons unlocked the door to the plaintiff’s cell while he was asleep, allowing inmates to come in and drug and sexually assault him. He slept through all these outrages and only discovered what had happened when one day he noticed a needle mark under his lip. When he visited the prison infirmary to have the mark attended to, the medical personnel claimed not to see the mark because they were trying to make him think that he was delusional. These are copycat allegations from Denton v. Hernandez, 504 U.S. 25, 27-28 (1992), and are obviously and knowingly false.

“It was Denton, coincidentally, that held that a district court’s finding of factual frivolousness under an earlier, similarly worded statute, 28 U.S.C. sec. 1915(d), is to be reviewed for abuse of discretion, a deferential standard. True, the district judge hasn’t a great advantage over the appellate judges when it comes to assessing the adequacy of a complaint, but, as emphasized in Denton itself and in a number of other cases as well, … he has some, because district judges see many more prisoner suits, with their often bizarre allegations, than appellate judges do. In addition, the determination that particular factual allegations are too crazy to trigger any sort of evidentiary proceeding (such as requiring the defendants to file affidavits in support of a motion for summary judgment) is case-specific and so does not engage the primary duty of an appellate court, which is to maintain the coherence and (reasonable) uniformity, as well as the lawfulness and intelligence, of legal doctrine.

“Such differences as there are between section 1915 and section 1915A do not bear on the considerations relevant to the scope of review of a finding of factual frivolousness. The standard of review is the same under both statutes, and it is abuse of discretion.”

Affirmed.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Tinder, J., Posner, J.