# McCarthy v. Madigan > Supreme Court of the United States · March 4, 1992 · 503 U.S. 140 URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9432483 ## Case - **Full name:** McCARTHY v. MADIGAN Et Al. - **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States - **Decided:** March 4, 1992 - **Citations:** 503 U.S. 140; 112 S. Ct. 1081; 117 L. Ed. 2d 291; 1992 U.S. LEXIS 1524 - **Precedential status:** Published - **Opinion:** Concurring in part by Rehnquist - **Judges:** Blackmun, White, Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas - **Cited by:** 1,574 later opinions in the Frix Law Library ## Citator (automated) - **Yellow flag:** Reported overruled in part, on other grounds by Booth v. Churner, 532 U.S. 731 (2001) — not on the Supreme Court's list. - Negative treatments: 4 - Distinguished by: 1 - Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9432483 ## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction) - explaining that the exhaustion doctrine is “grounded in deference to Congress’s delegation of authority to coordinate branches, that agencies, not the courts, ought to have primary responsibility for the programs that Congress has charged them to administer" and emphasizing th… - holding that the exhaustion of internal grievance procedures promulgated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons is not a prerequisite to a federal prisoner’s initiation of a suit for damages pursuant to the authority of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of Narcotics,… - finding where the Attorney General has already determined “that the challenged rules of the prison were validly and correctly applied to petitioner, requiring administrative review through a process culminating with the Attorney General would be to demand a futile act” - stating that “administrative remedies need not be pursued if the litigant’s interests in immediate judicial review outweigh the government’s interests in the efficiency or administrative autonomy that the exhaustion doctrine is designed to further” - recognizing that Congress had not intended general inmate grievance procedures to impose exhaustion requirement on Bivens actions when the procedures did not address harms raised or remedies provided by Bivens action ## Opinion text Chief Justice Rehnquist, with whom Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas join, concurring in the judgment. I agree with the Court’s holding that a federal prisoner need not exhaust the procedures promulgated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. My view, however, is based entirely on the fact that the grievance procedure at issue does not provide for any award of monetary damages. As a result, in cases such as this one where prisoners seek monetary relief, the Bureau’s administrative remedy furnishes no effective remedy at all, and it is therefore improper to impose an exhaustion requirement. See McNeese v. Board of Ed. for Community Unit School Dist. 187, 373 U. S. 668, 675 (1963); Montana National Bank of Billings v. Yellowstone County, 276 U. S. 499, 505 (1928). *157 Because I would base the decision on this ground, I do not join the Court’s extensive discussion of the general principles of exhaustion, nor do I agree with the implication that those general principles apply without modification in the context of a Bivens claim. In particular, I disagree with the Court’s reliance on the grievance procedure’s filing deadlines as a basis for excusing exhaustion. As the majority observes, ante, at 146-147, we have previously refused to require exhaustion of administrative remedies where the administrative process subjects plaintiffs to unreasonable delay or to an indefinite timeframe for decision. See Coit Independence Joint Venture v. FSLIC, 489 U. S. 561, 587 (1989); Gibson v. Berryhill, 411 U. S. 564, 575, n. 14 (1973); Walker v. Southern R. Co., 385 U. S. 196, 198 (1966); Smith v. Illinois Bell Telephone Co., 270 U. S. 587, 591-592 (1926). This principle rests on our belief that when a plaintiff might have to wait seemingly forever for an agency decision, agency procedures are “inadequate” and therefore need not be exhausted. Coit Independence Joint Venture v. FSLIC, supra, at 587. But the Court makes strange use of this principle in holding that filing deadlines imposed by agency procedures may provide a basis for finding that those procedures need not be exhausted. Ante, at 152-153. Whereas before we have held that procedures without “reasonable time limit[s]” may be inadequate because they make a plaintiff wait too long, Coit Independence Joint Venture v. FSLIC, supra, at 587, today the majority concludes that strict filing deadlines might also contribute to a finding of inadequacy because they make a plaintiff move too quickly. But surely the second proposition does not follow from the first. In fact, short filing deadlines will almost always promote quick decision-making by an agency, the very result that we have advocated repeatedly in the cases cited above. So long as there is an escape clause, as there is here, and the time limit is within a *158 zone of reasonableness, as I believe it is here, the length of the period should not be a factor in deciding the adequacy of the remedy. --- Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9432483. Public record. Not legal advice.