932 F.2d 728 - Flick v. Alba — 932 F.2d 728

How this case has been cited

Cited by 80 later decisions — most recently September 2018 · most notably Antonelli v. Sheahan (1996), Adams v. Rice (1994)

12 federal appellate · 13 district · 1 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

Norman Z. Flick, pro se.

Mary Jo Madigan, Minneapolis, Minn., for appellees.

Before ARNOLD, WOLLMAN, and BEAM, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM.

¶1

Norman Z. Flick, an inmate at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Rochester, Minnesota, appeals the district court's1 order granting defendant prison officials' motion for summary judgment. We affirm.

¶2

Flick filed his Bivens-type complaint against the case manager coordinator and the warden of FMC seeking injunctive relief and damages for their denial of his right of access to the prison's administrative remedy procedure. We conclude that the federal regulations providing for an administrative remedy procedure do not in and of themselves create a liberty interest in access to that procedure. When the claim underlying the administrative grievance involves a constitutional right, the prisoner's right to petition the government for redress is the right of access to the courts, which is not compromised by the prison's refusal to entertain his grievance. See Azeez v. DeRobertis, 568 F.Supp. 8, 10 (N.D.Ill.1982) (although state prison grievance procedures "may be evidence of a parent substantive right, they do not in themselves trigger a protected liberty interest").2

¶3

Accordingly, we affirm.

The Honorable Harry H. MacLaughlin, United States District Judge for the District of Minnesota

We note that, in any event, in this case denial of Flick's administrative complaint was in accordance with established procedure