UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

┐ LAMONT BERNARD HEARD, │ Plaintiff-Appellant, │ > No. 23-1624 │ v. │ │ YARNICE STRANGE; JEFFREY OOSTERHOF; ADAM │ DOUGLAS; CHRISTIAN ALCORN, │ Defendants-Appellees. │ ┘

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit. No. 2:21-cv-10237—Nancy G. Edmunds, District Judge.

Argued: January 23, 2025

Decided and Filed: January 29, 2025

Before: GILMAN, McKEAGUE, and THAPAR, Circuit Judges.

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COUNSEL ARGUED: James Y. Xi, CLEMENT & MURPHY, PLLC, Alexandria, Virginia, for Appellant. Joshua S. Smith, OFFICE OF THE MICHIGAN ATTORNEY GENERAL, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellees. ON BRIEF: James Y. Xi, CLEMENT & MURPHY, PLLC, Alexandria, Virginia, for Appellant. Joshua S. Smith, OFFICE OF THE MICHIGAN ATTORNEY GENERAL, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellees. _________________

OPINION _________________

THAPAR, Circuit Judge. Prisoners often have complaints about prison life. When these complaints arise, prisoners can’t go straight to federal court. The Prison Litigation Reform Act No. 23-1624 Heard v. Strange, et al. Page 2

(“PLRA”) requires prisoners to seek relief from state prison officials before filing a federal lawsuit. This is called an “exhaustion” requirement since prisoners must exhaust their administrative remedies before suing.

Michigan’s “tolling provision” doesn’t affect that requirement. Instead, it merely pauses Michigan’s statute of limitations while a claim is pending in court. That way, if an otherwise timely claim is later dismissed for procedural reasons (like a failure to exhaust administrative remedies), the plaintiff has an opportunity to re-file the claim. So how could Michigan’s tolling rule be inconsistent with the PLRA’s exhaustion requirement? The district court said that it was, reasoning that Michigan’s tolling rule conflicted with unexpressed purposes that Congress might have harbored when enacting the PLRA. But as federal judges, we can’t speculate about the hypothetical purposes of a law. We have to follow the text that Congress enacted. Because the plain text of the PLRA casts no doubt on state tolling provisions, we reverse the judgment below.

I.

Lamont Heard is a Michigan prisoner serving a life sentence. Heard claims that various prison officials retaliated against him for his litigation activities by transferring him to a different housing unit, called the Burns unit. Thus, he wants to sue the prison officials under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for allegedly violating his First Amendment rights.

This case hinges on the procedural timeline. Heard says that he was wrongfully transferred to the Burns unit on January 10, 2017. And one day after the transfer occurred, he filed a grievance. He claims that this grievance was returned months later with instructions to file it with the local grievance coordinator, that he did so, and that the coordinator never respo