Eaves v. Polis.
No. 23-1143. 3/4/2026. D.Colo. Judge Baldock. First Amendment—Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act—Eleventh Amendment Immunity—Constitutional Mootness—Prudential Mootness—Ex Parte Young.
March 4, 2026
Eaves, who is in the custody of the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC), filed this pro se suit for monetary and injunctive relief concerning his confinement conditions in the Bent County Correctional Facility (BCCF). Eaves alleged a violation of his right to practice his Sac & Fox faith under the First Amendment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. His Amended Complaint (AC) names 18 defendants in their official and individual capacities who may be categorized as (1) Colorado Governor Polis, (2) six CDOD officials, and (3) 11 BCCF employees. Governor Polis moved to dismiss the AC’s official-capacity claims for injunctive relief against him on the basis of Eleventh Amendment immunity. The district court denied his motion, and Governor Polis appealed. While this appeal was pending, the CDOC transferred Eaves out of BCCF and ultimately into the Sterling Correctional Facility (SCF), where he now resides. Governor Polis alerted the Tenth Circuit to this transfer just before oral argument, maintaining that the case was now moot.
On appeal, Governor Polis argued that he lacked the requisite connection to the CDOC regulations and policies that Eaves challenged, so the prospective relief exception to the Eleventh Amendment established in Ex Parte Young, 209 U.S. 123 (1908), did not apply. But the Tenth Circuit first had to decide whether Eaves’s transfer to another CDOC facility rendered his claims for injunctive relief against Governor Polis (1) constitutionally moot, meaning a case or controversy no longer existed for the district court to adjudicate; or (2) prudentially moot, meaning the district court must exercise its remedial discretion and dismiss the claims for injunctive relief without prejudice. To resolve the mootness issue, the Tenth Circuit initially considered whether it could exercise its discretion to consider Eaves’s affidavit, attached to his supplemental brief, regarding his current SCF confinement conditions. Where a party on appeal raises mootness based on events subsequent to the district court’s judgment, the opposing party may be permitted to submit facts in response suggesting those events have not rendered the controversy moot. Accordingly, the Tenth Circuit considered Eaves’s affidavit, which asserted that his confinement conditions at SCF were the same as they were at the BCCF.
As to constitutional mootness, a case becomes constitutionally moot when the party raising this issue shows that subsequent events establish that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur, thus making it impossible for the court to grant effective relief. Here, Eaves’s undisputed affidavit represented that his confinement conditions at the SCF were substantially the same as they were at the BCCF. Further, Governor Polis did not show that if Eaves ultimately prevailed, the district court would be unable to award him meaningful injunctive relief. Accordingly, the claims for injunctive relief against Governor Polis were not constitutionally moot.
As to prudential mootness, even if a case is not constitutionally moot, a court may rely on its remedial discretion to conclude that the benefit of injunctive relief is too speculative to justify granting such relief. To avoid dismissal for prudential mootness, the plaintiff must establish that a recurrent violation of the alleged wrongs is more than an abstract possibility, such that the court may grant meaningful relief. As stated above, Eaves’s undisputed affidavit indicated that the CDOC continued to subject him post-transfer to at least some of the allegedly unlawful confinement conditions from which he sought relief. Eaves thus met his burden of showing that his claims for injunctive relief against Governor Polis were not prudentially moot.
Lastly, the Tenth Circuit addressed whether Governor Polis had the requisite connection to the CDOC regulations and policies that Eaves complained about such that Eleventh Amendment immunity did not apply to preclude injunctive relief. Ex Parte Young required Governor Polis to have “some connection with the enforcement” of CDOC regulations and policies. 209 U.S. at 157. The Tenth Circuit cited Raven v. Polis, 479 P.3d 918, 919, 922 (Colo. 2021), where the Colorado Supreme Court recognized that the “CDOC is an executive agency directly within the Governor’s control . . . over which he has ultimate authority.” Accordingly, and together with the AC’s factual allegations accepted as true, Ex Parte Young’s exception to Eleventh Amendment immunity applied, and the district court properly denied the motion to dismiss on the basis of such immunity.
The judgment was affirmed and the case was remanded for further proceedings.