Parole Revocation

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: James Courtney v. Kimberly Butler

Case No.: 21-2697

Officials: Rovner, Hamilton, and Brennan, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Parole Revocation

This appeal presents a new question on the scope of the Supreme Court’s decision in Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), which forecloses civil litigation that would call into question the validity of a state criminal conviction or sentence that has not been set aside. Heck extends to civil litigation that would call into question the validity of a parole revocation, at least when the revocation is based on the parolee’s wrongdoing. Knowlin v. Thompson, 207 F.3d 907, 909 (7th Cir. 2000). The new question here is whether and how Heck applies when release on parole is denied based not on the parolee’s actions but on state officials’ alleged failures to do their jobs.

Courtney was sentenced to three years in state prison followed by one year of “mandatory supervised release,” the current name for parole in Illinois. But in a practice known as “violating at the door,” Courtney’s mandatory supervised release was revoked before he ever left prison. The stated reason was not that he had acted wrongly in some way but that he had no arrangements for a place to live that state officials deemed suitable. Courtney spent the one year of his “mandatory supervised release” in prison

The Seventh Circuit affirmed in part but remanded the claims based on the defendants’ failure to do their jobs. Courtney’s claims that the defendants, after his parole revocation, ignored his grievances and communications regarding possible host sites, if substantiated, would not necessarily imply that the Prison Review Board’s decision to revoke his parole was invalid.

Affirmed in part, reversed in part and remanded

Decided 05/03/23

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