Key Points

  • The Eighth Circuit held that a Section 1983 suit dismissed under Heck v. Humphrey is a dismissal for failure to state a claim and counts as a strike under the PLRA's three-strikes rule, 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g).
  • The court treated its 1995 decision in Schafer v. Moore as binding and reiterated that when Heck applies, favorable termination of the conviction or sentence is an element of the plaintiff's claim.
  • The court reasoned that because a Heck-type claim does not accrue until the conviction or sentence is invalidated, favorable termination is needed for a complete and present cause of action, and it relied on Heck's analogy to malicious prosecution.
  • The opinion aligns the Eighth Circuit with the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Tenth and D.C. Circuits and records that the Second, Seventh and Ninth Circuits do not categorically treat Heck dismissals as failures to state a claim.
  • The court declined to recharacterize the prisoner's earlier Section 1983 suit over disciplinary segregation as a habeas petition and affirmed the denial of in forma pauperis status.

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that a prisoner's civil rights suit thrown out because it would undercut a conviction or sentence that still stands counts as a "strike" under the Prison Litigation Reform Act. That 1995 law generally bars prisoners who have had three prior suits dismissed as frivolous, malicious, or for failure to state a claim from suing without first paying the filing fee.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed an order by U.S. District Judge Audrey G. Fleissig of the Eastern District of Missouri. Judge Fleissig had denied Calvin J. Williams permission to proceed in forma pauperis, meaning without prepaying the fee, in his suit challenging several conditions of his confinement at Moberly Correctional Center in Missouri. Judge Grasz wrote the opinion for a panel that also included Chief Judge Colloton and Judge Arnold.

The decision places the Eighth Circuit with the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Tenth and D.C. Circuits, which treat such a dismissal as one for failure to state a claim. A footnote in the opinion records that the Second, Seventh and Ninth Circuits "do not categorically do so." The panel also stated outright a rule that its own 1995 precedent had left implicit, writing that "when Heck applies, it adds an element to the plaintiff's claim."

The dispute turned on Heck v. Humphrey, a 1994 Supreme Court decision about suits under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. As the Eighth Circuit described it, if a judgment for a Section 1983 plaintiff "would necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or sentence," Heck requires the plaintiff to "demonstrate that the conviction or sentence has already been invalidated." The Eighth Circuit has labeled that rule "the 'favorable-termination' requirement."

The district court found that Williams had three prior suits dismissed for failure to state a claim. Williams argued on appeal that one of them, dismissed under Heck, should not count, because it was not dismissed for "fail[ure] to state a claim." The panel reviewed the question de novo and rejected the argument.

The panel relied first on Schafer v. Moore, a 1995 Eighth Circuit decision holding that a Heck-barred complaint "was properly dismissed for failure to state a claim." Williams sought to recast that holding as a passing description of Heck dismissals. Judge Grasz responded that Schafer had reasoned that "no claim for damages lies" unless a plaintiff clears the Heck bar. "This reasoning was not a passing characterization," he wrote, and it bound the panel because it was necessary to Schafer's result.

Judge Grasz then made Schafer's premise explicit. "To the extent there is any ambiguity remaining about the nature of our holding in Schafer, due to its brevity, we reiterate that when Heck applies, it adds an element to the plaintiff's claim," he wrote. He cited Black's Law Dictionary, which defines an element as "[a] constituent part of a claim that must be proved for the claim to succeed," and concluded that the favorable-termination requirement fits that definition.

The opinion supported that conclusion with the law of accrual. Under Heck, a Section 1983 damages claim tied to an unconstitutional conviction or sentence does not arise until that conviction or sentence is invalidated. Quoting the Supreme Court's 2019 decision in McDonough v. Smith in cleaned-up form, the opinion stated that a claim typically accrues when the plaintiff has a "complete and present cause of action."

Putting those rules together, Judge Grasz wrote, "Because a Heck-type claim cannot accrue until the underlying conviction or sentence has been invalidated, it follows that favorable termination is an element that must be met for a plaintiff to have a 'complete and present cause of action.'"

The panel drew a second line of support from Heck's own method. The Supreme Court in Heck borrowed the favorable-termination rule from malicious prosecution, a common-law tort in which a plaintiff must prove that the earlier criminal case ended in the accused's favor. "This implies that if the favorable-termination requirement is an element of malicious prosecution, then it is an element of Heck-type claims as well," Judge Grasz wrote.

Williams had advanced three counterarguments. He contended that Heck dismissals rest on prematurity rather than a failure to state a claim on the merits, that they resemble exhaustion- or abstention-based dismissals, and that favorable termination serves only as a threshold test because it does not apply to every Section 1983 claim. "These arguments broadly reflect the views of those circuits that have taken the minority position on this issue," the court wrote. "But they are inconsistent with our holding in Schafer, so we need not address them further."

In a footnote, the panel also turned away Williams's argument that the earlier suit should be treated as a mislabeled habeas petition. In his view, a habeas petition would not be subject to the three-strikes rule. That earlier case, Williams v. Manthey, No. 6:05-CV-3083, filed in 2005 in the Western District of Missouri, sought damages and injunctive relief under Section 1983 over Williams's placement in disciplinary segregation based on an allegedly fabricated conduct violation report.

The panel reasoned that habeas is the exclusive remedy for a prisoner seeking "immediate or speedier release," while complaints about prison discipline or segregation belong under Section 1983. "Williams plainly chose to prosecute a § 1983 action, and we decline his invitation to retroactively rewrite his complaint into a habeas petition," the court wrote.

"In sum, a Heck dismissal is a dismissal for failure to state a claim, so it counts as a PLRA strike," the opinion concludes. The case was submitted on June 9. The affirmance leaves in place the order denying Williams in forma pauperis status in his suit over conditions at Moberly.