Prison Grievance Coordinator Continues To Violate Prisoner Civil Rights
When you're a prison administrator and you've been sued in federal court for your continued violation of prisoner civil rights, you'd think that you'd wise-up and stop your illegal activities--especially when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (federal jurisdiction) has published a case and warned you about your shenanigans. I mean, unless you're Dennis Dahne, that is.
I just recently found out that the mail-room at the prison where I'm currently being held has been secretly stealing prisoner's pictures off of our JPay tablets without telling us about it and without giving us the due process notification and opportunity to appeal (which is a fundamental right long-established in the Ninth Circuit. See Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 417-19 (1974)). After finding out that the mail-room has been silently and secretly stealing my pictures, I attempted to grieve the issue. Dennis Dahne, Grievance coordinator at Stafford Creek Correction Center, told me to rewrite the complaint and list the specific dates that the pictures were removed. I rewrote the grievance and clearly detailed that I don't know when the confiscations occurred because they're being done in secret. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if I don't know when the mail-room staff took my pictures because they're not notifying me when they do so, then I CLEARLY cannot list the dates when the confiscations occurred, right?
Apparently, Dahne is NOT a genius. Either that, or he's intentionally interfering with my First Amendment right to petition my government for redress of grievances, because he sent it back to me A SECOND TIME for another rewrite, AGAIN telling me to list the dates that the secret confiscations occurred. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt by calling him an imbecile here, because otherwise it’s gonna be troublesome for him and the DOC. See, if you type in ''Dennis Dahne'' into the Westlaw search bank for the U.S. District Court and the Ninth Circuit federal Court of Appeals, you'll see that he's been sued before. ALOT. In fact, he's been sued so many times that the Ninth Circuit FINALLY got tired of his shenanigans and chastised him publicly in the PUBLISHED opinion of Richey v. Dahne, 733 Fed.Appx. 881 (9th Cir. 2018).
In the Richey case, Dahne kept telling that prisoner to rewrite his grievances and to use specific language or refrain from using specific language based upon Dahne's perception that Richey's grievances were repeatedly and concisely stating that the officials were violating the laws of the State and of the United States. I mean, God forbid that a prisoner call out the officials who're intentionally committing civil right violations, better to have the grievance coordinator scrub the record first so it’s a lot easier to cover up later in the lawsuits, right? Well, the Ninth Circuit specifically checked Dahne's antics, instructing him to discontinue the practice of interfering with prisoners' First Amendment right to petition by the use of his ''rewrite'' scheme based on content. In other words, the Ninth Circuit Court has already told Dahne to stop telling prisoners to rewrite their grievances based on content, and even went so far as to say that, though they were giving him a pass in that case since there wasn't any ''clearly established case law'' on this specific topic, there wouldn't be any more passes thereafter since THAT case now establishes the precedent for prison officials to NOT VIOLATE PRISONERS' FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO PETITON FOR REDRESS OF GRIEVANCE.
Maybe Dahne doesn't know how to read? Or maybe he just doesn't give two flying fucks about the law and thinks that just because he works for the prison he can violate the law of the land in performing his duties within the prison. I honestly don't know, but what I DO know is that he's committing the same flagrant civil rights violations against me that he has already been warned about by the federal court before. And that means that he will NOT be indemnified with ''qualified immunity'' in my ensuing 42 U.S.C §1983 lawsuit to remedy the matter, because the law was clearly established the last time he violated a prisoner's civil rights and got sued.
Do you wonder why so many prisoners come out of prison frustrated and with a chip on their shoulder? A lot of times it’s simply because prisoners tend to be knuckleheads bent against the system, but sometimes it’s because they're psychologically nitpicked and surreptitiously attacked like this by a myriad of prison personnel during their bids. Granted: a lot of prisoners are not the brightest or most logical-thinking people in our society, but we're still human beings, and the State and Federal Constitutions were written to ensure that certain rights will NEVER be infringed upon by our public servants in the performance of their duties. When prisoners try to get their shit together and step up to assert their rights, there seems to be no end to the manipulative games that some of the staff will play to ensure that the crimes being committed by prison staff do not get put out in the open. That type of mentality should not continue unchecked by the prison administration, but when the admin continuously turn a blind eye and manipulatively cover up for their disgruntled personnel, then it’s up to the prisoners to step up and use the courts to enforce the civil rights that nary anybody else tries to enforce.
The sad part about it: there aren't many prisoners that will take on that responsibility. Read all about Dennis Dahne's attitude and mentality against prisoners in the published Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case, Richey v. Dahne, 733 Fed.Appx. 881 (9th Cir. 2018).
