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The prison officials argued that a prisoner must complete the administrative review process in accordance with the applicable procedural rules, including deadlines, before bringing suit in federal court. Ngo's attorneys, on the other hand, argued that this provision simply means that a prisoner may
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Justice Alito, for the majority, ruled in favor of the prison officials, writing that "proper exhaustion demands compliance with an agency's deadlines and other critical procedural rules because no adjudicative system can function effectively without imposing some orderly structure on the course of
161:(PLRA) requirement that a prisoner exhaust any available administrative remedies before challenging prison conditions in federal court bars him from doing so not only when this first lawsuit has been lost, but also when he failed to timely brought it.
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its proceedings." The point of the PLRA, he continues, is to avoid "unwarranted federal-court interference with the administration of prisons," and to allow Ngo's interpretation would frustrate the goal of the legislation.
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The question presented was "whether a prisoner can satisfy the Prison
Litigation Reform Act's exhaustion requirement ... by filing an untimely or otherwise procedurally defective administrative grievance or appeal."
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Justice Breyer concurred in the judgment. While he agreed with the Court's interpretation of "exhaustion" in this case, he wrote also that administrative law "contains well established exceptions to exhaustion."
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not bring suit in federal court until administrative remedies are no longer available, even if the reason they are no longer available is due to the prisoner's own non-compliance with the applicable rules.
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granted the prison officials' motion to dismiss on the ground that respondent had not fully exhausted his administrative remedies under the PLRA. The
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prison officials about conditions in the prison, but it was rejected as untimely under state law. He then sued the prison officials under
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public domain material from this U.S government document
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Jeanne S. Woodford, et al., Petitioners v. Viet Mike Ngo
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United States
Supreme Court cases of the Roberts Court
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