Eight Grievances Never Got a Number. Five of Them Were About My Defense.

By Ryan Nichols

I kept a log.

Every grievance I filed inside that jail. The date I filed it. The number they gave it. What it was about. Which step it reached. Whether anybody answered. Whether anything got fixed.

Twenty nine entries. November 7, 2021 through July 16, 2022.

Two of them say resolved.

Twelve of them never got an answer at all.

And eight of them never got a number.

Read that again. Eight complaints went into a formal grievance system and came back out with no tracking number attached to them.

Five of those eight were about my ability to defend myself.

The plain English version

A grievance number is not decoration. It is the handle.

It is how a complaint gets logged, routed, appealed, counted, and pulled back up later when somebody asks what happened. Without a number there is nothing to appeal. There is nothing to look up. There is no row in anybody''s report.

A complaint with no number is not denied.

It is erased.

Why it matters

I was a pretrial detainee. Not convicted of anything. Waiting on a trial in a federal case.

The Sixth Amendment says a man in that position gets to prepare a defense. Talk to his lawyer. See the evidence against him. Receive his legal mail.

The grievance process is the only lawful complaint channel a detainee has. It is the door. It is also, in almost every court in this country, the door you have to walk through before a judge will hear you at all.

So when the door stops issuing numbers, the complaint never officially happened. And the man inside runs out of clock.

The receipt, and the contrast that makes it

Here is what stopped me when I pulled the log back up.

They had no trouble numbering a mail grievance.

They only had trouble when the mail was legal.

FACT. January 8, 2022. Complaint type COMMUNICATIONS. Concern: MAIL. Grievance number 20220126-550. Step 1. Response: yes. Date of response: February 3, 2022. Resolved: yes.

That is one of only two entries in the entire twenty nine row log marked resolved.

FACT. July 5, 2022. Complaint type DENIED ACCESS TO DISCOVERY. Concern: LEGAL MAIL CONFISCATED. Grievance number: NO IGP# ASSIGNED. Step 4, the top of the ladder. Response: no. Date of response: NO RESPONSE. Resolved: no.

Same jail.

Same man.

Same subject. Mail.

One got a number and an answer in twenty six days.

The other got nothing, at the highest step there is, and it is still nothing today.

The only thing that changed between January and July is who the mail belonged to.

In January it was my mail.

In July it was my defense.

The timeline of the five that vanished

Every one of these carries NO IGP# ASSIGNED in the number column and NO RESPONSE in the response column. Watch the step climb.

FACT. January 29, 2022. DENIED ACCESS TO ATTORNEY. Concern: legal communication. Step 1. No number. No response.

FACT. March 9, 2022. DENIED ACCESS TO DISCOVERY. Concern: legal communication. Step 1. No number. No response.

FACT. May 28, 2022. DENIED ACCESS TO DISCOVERY. Concern: legal communication. Step 2. No number. No response.

FACT. July 5, 2022. DENIED ACCESS TO DISCOVERY. Concern: denied access to the discovery platform. Step 3. No number. No response.

FACT. July 5, 2022. DENIED ACCESS TO DISCOVERY. Concern: legal mail confiscated. Step 4. No number. No response.

Step 1 in January. Step 4 in July.

Six months of climbing a ladder that was never numbered at the bottom.

What the record shows about the ones that did get numbers

I am not going to tell you every legal access grievance disappeared. Three of them got numbers. Here is exactly what came back.

FACT. Grievance 20220527-603, filed May 20, 2022, Step 2, denied access to discovery. Response dated May 27, 2022. The response reads "NON GRIEVABLE (SEE STEP 3 BELOW)." Resolved: no.

FACT. Grievance 20220601-693, filed May 28, 2022, denied access to the discovery platform. Response dated June 2, 2022. The response reads "INMATE WILL BE PUT ON DISCOVERY LIST." Resolved: no. My log entry on that one says the Step 2 got no response.

FACT. Grievance 20220527-603 again, Step 3, filed June 1, 2022. The response reads "THIS ISSUE IN THIS GRIEVANCE IS ADDRESSED IN #20220512-288." Resolved: no.

So the three that got numbers came back non grievable, deferred to a list, or pointed at a different number.

Zero of the eight legal access grievances in my log are marked resolved.

What I say

RYAN STATEMENT. I was not asking for a favor. I was asking to see the evidence the government intended to use against me, and to send and receive mail to the lawyer defending me against it.

RYAN STATEMENT. I filed on paper, in order, one step at a time, the way the process says to file. I did not skip a rung. The log shows Step 1, then Step 1, then Step 2, then Step 3, then Step 4.

RYAN STATEMENT. My position is that a system which issues a number for ordinary mail and no number for legal mail is not overwhelmed. It is selective. But I am telling you that is my read, and I am not asking anyone to take it on my word.

RYAN STATEMENT. I am asking for the forms.

What still needs authentication

I am publishing my log. I am not publishing a court finding, and I will not dress one up as the other.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. The signed grievance forms themselves, front and back, for all twenty nine entries. The log is my contemporaneous record of them. The forms are the proof.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. The facility''s own grievance register for the same window. If eight of my complaints truly carry no number, the register is where that shows up, or fails to.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. One anomaly I am flagging out loud rather than arguing. The Step 3 on grievance 20220527-603 is logged as filed June 1, 2022 with a response dated May 27, 2022. That is a response dated five days before the filing. It may be a reused Step 2 answer. It may be a transcription error in my own log. I do not know which, and I am not going to pretend I do until the forms are produced.

NEEDS AUTHENTICATION. The names. The log carries a manager name on some rows and no signature on others. Those are public employees acting in an official capacity and naming them is lawful. They stay out of this article until the signed form that carries the name is posted next to it. The document travels. The adjective does not.

What this does not prove

It does not prove anyone deliberately withheld a number.

It does not prove a policy exists to treat legal mail differently from ordinary mail.

It does not prove intent by any individual officer, manager, or agency.

It does not establish a Sixth Amendment violation as a matter of law. A court does that, and no court has done it on these entries.

What this does prove

It proves I wrote it down while it was happening.

It proves that in the same facility, in the same year, a grievance about mail was numbered, answered in twenty six days, and closed as resolved.

It proves that eight complaints in that log have no number and no answer, and that five of the eight are about attorney access, discovery, the discovery platform, and legal mail. The other three cover food, hygiene, and the grievance process itself.

It proves the escalation is documented. Step 1 to Step 4 across six months, in writing, in order.

And it proves the question is a fair one to ask out loud:

If the process worked in January, what changed by July?

Release the forms. Release the grievance register. Let the paper answer it.

The record does not lie. It just sits there until somebody reads it.

The bigger reason this archive exists

I am not the only person this happened to, and I am not the only one who kept paper.

If you are a January 6 defendant, a family member, an attorney, or a journalist sitting on records nobody has organized, that is what the case archive is for. If you have something to add to this specific window, send it here. J6 case profiles are free for J6 defendants and always will be.

If you want the long version of how any of this happened, it is in the book.

If you are a business owner who found this page and you are wondering who builds a public record like this, that is what I do for a living.

What I need

Do not threaten anyone.

Do not harass anyone.

Do not contact anyone in my name.

Read it. Share it. Send receipts, evidence, and witnesses.

Put eyes on the record.

Genesis 50:20 is on the front of this site for a reason. I did not build this archive to stay angry. I built it so the paper outlives the people who hoped it would not.