This is the complete opening brief filed in the Sixth Circuit on behalf of a state prisoner whose pro se civil-rights complaint was dismissed with prejudice at screening under 28 U.S.C. § 1915A. The UCLA School of Law Prisoners' Rights Clinic briefs three cases each semester; this appeal was my team's, carried from inception to filing with the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center as co-counsel. The brief credits clinic students Binwant Kaur Kahlon, Mark Pampanin, Shannon Saul, and myself.

I drafted the Statement of the Case, the Standards of Review, and the fact-driven core of the leave-to-amend argument—that denying Mr. Bass a chance to amend without explanation was itself an abuse of discretion, and that the defects the court identified were curable with facts he could plead. The Sixth Circuit's remand tracked that argument. The filed brief, though, is a collective work, with input from Mr. Bass; substantial insight and editing from the full student team, supervising professors, the clinic's faculty director, and the clinic's law librarian; and support and inspiration from many others.

On October 17, 2025, the Sixth Circuit ruled in our favor. The court reversed the dismissal of Mr. Bass's complaint and remanded with leave to amend his First and Eighth Amendment claims—on the abuse-of-discretion argument I drafted: the defects the district court identified were curable, and the answer to a thin pro se complaint is leave to amend, not dismissal with prejudice.

The court did not hold that the original complaint already stated an Eighth Amendment claim, but that was never the path that mattered. By setting out the facts Mr. Bass could plead, we showed amendment would not be futile—the one thing that could have justified denying him leave to replead. The panel's instructions for the amended complaint tracked our brief:

And if an amended complaint were to include allegations that Bass was indeed subjected to a sufficiently serious risk of grievous injury due to the "concrete slab with metal screws" upon which he was forced to sleep, such allegations would likely be sufficient to plausibly plead an Eighth Amendment claim.

Mr. Bass now has the chance to replead the claims he never should have lost.

As a Summer Fellow at Yale Law School's Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization in June 2025, I surveyed three years of federal compassionate-release decisions under the First Step Act. The Criminal Justice Clinic used the research to shape its pro bono strategy and to choose cases. I drafted the memo, and it has not been substantially edited by anyone else; my supervising attorney authorized this submission. I updated it on July 2, 2026, to address the Supreme Court's decisions in Fernandez v. United States and Rutherford v. United States.