by Chuck Sharman

In a torturously reasoned opinion issued on June 16, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama slammed the door on a federal prisoner’s claims that U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials violated her civil rights with a decade-long delay in treatment of her uterine fibroid, allowing it to grow from one that could be removed with minimally invasive surgery to a life-threatening size that will require a complete hysterectomy. Though a crushing loss for the prisoner, Terri Maguire-Mollica, 60, the ruling nevertheless provides important guidance for any other federal prisoner denied medical care.

As PLN reported, it was a month after the BOP transferred her to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Aliceville, Alabama, that Maguire-Mollica was diagnosed with a six-centimeter-long fibroid in her uterus that “could have been removed laparoscopically, with minimal invasiveness,” according to the complaint she later filed. When three years passed and she was still waiting for treatment, she initiated a grievance through the BOP’s administrative remedy system in October 2019. When that went nowhere, she filed suit in October 2020 accusing the BOP of violating her Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment. BOP officials claimed that she had failed to exhaust their grievance system, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e. The district court agreed and dismissed her complaint. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated that decision, finding that it was BOP officials who dropped the ball when they failed to file the last form she submitted. Since the system offered her no guidance what to do then, the appellate Court said that the grievance process had become so opaque as to render it unavailable, thereby excusing her failure to complete it under the PLRA. [See: PLN, Mar. 2026, p.43.]

Back at the district court, Defendants moved for judgment on the pleadings, arguing that Maguire-Mollica’s claim required an impermissible extension of the right to sue federal employees, which was originally recognized by the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971). Curiously, SCOTUS explicitly extended that right to Eighth Amendment claims for deliberate indifference to serious medical needs—like Maguire-Mollica’s claim—in Carlson v. Green, 446 U.S. 14 (1980), long before the current, more reactionary majority on the high court closed the door to further extensions in Ziglar v. Abassi, 582 U.S. 120 (2017).

So how did the district court then decide that Maguire-Mollica’s claim fell outside the Bivens framework, as extended by Carlson? Because in its 2024 ruling in Johnson v. Terry, the Eleventh Circuit had already ruled that any difference between a prisoner’s claim and the one in Carlson meant that it must be dismissed, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Feb. 2025, p.15.] The district court took that instruction and went looking for ways that Maguire-Mollica’s case differed, finding not one but three.

First, the Court said, Maguire-Mollica suffered from a uterine malady, not asthma like Carlson’s, and her case was not fatal (so far), while Carlson had died. Secondly, the BOP had implemented its administrative remedy program in the half-century since Carlson’s death—and even though it had been found unavailable to Maguire-Mollica, the district court said that it was a circumstance significant enough to find the two cases unalike. Accordingly, the BOP’s motion for judgment on the pleadings was granted, and the case was dismissed. See: McGuire-Mollica v. Griffin, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 133861 (N.D. Ala.).

The cruel irony is that the district court found the BOP’s grievance system offered Maguire-Mollica relief that wasn’t available to Carlson, when in fact barely 2% of grievances filed by federal prisoners are ever granted. According to information obtained via a records request by the Data Liberation Project (DLP), nearly three-quarters of some 40,000 complaints (or appeals to complaint denials) filed by BOP prisoners in 2023 were rejected not on their merits but on technical grounds—such as containing too many pages or not providing enough copies. Worse, this trend points downward; DLP’s examination of 1.78 million complaints and appeals filed between January 2000 and late May 2024 found that the grant rate had fallen from 7% to the low 2% it counted. See: Federal Inmate Complaints, DLP (July 2024).

Where that leaves federal prisoners in the Eleventh Circuit making a denial-of-medical-care claim under Bivens is tough to say. SCOTUS in Carlson held that such claims are allowed. But the district court read this to mean that any prisoner who survives the BOP’s neglect is excluded—and any neglect too dissimilar from denied asthma treatment may fail to qualify. BOP prisoners in the circuit are cautioned, therefore, to couch their claims in terms that highlight similarities to Carlson, perhaps asking the obvious question—whether the courts would prefer they wait until they die.

Maguire-Mollica was still awaiting surgery when the district court dismissed her case in June, NPR reported. She has been transferred to a halfway house in Montgomery in anticipation of her release in November 2029—provided that she can survive that long.  

Additional source: NPR

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login