In 5-4 split ruling, SCOTUS holds prisoner has jury trial right on a PLRA exhaustion issue
In a ruling certain to be far less discussed that many other issued by the Supreme Court today, the Justices held by a 5-4 vote in Perttu v. Richards, No.23-1324 (S. Ct. June 18, 2025) (available here), that a prisoner has a right to have a jury resolve an exhaution issue under the Prison Litigation Reform Act. Chief Justice Roberts authored the opinion for the Court, which gets started and concludes this way:
The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA) requires prisoners with complaints about prison conditions to exhaust available grievance procedures before bringing suit in federal court. 42 U. S. C. §1997e(a). In some cases the question whether a prisoner has exhausted those procedures is intertwined with the merits of the prisoner’s lawsuit. Respondent Kyle Richards is a prisoner in Michigan. He alleges that he was sexually abused by petitioner Thomas Perttu, a prison employee. He also alleges that when he tried to file grievance forms about the abuse, Perttu destroyed them and threatened to kill him if he filed more.
Richards sued Perttu for violating his constitutional rights, including his First Amendment right to file grievances. Perttu responded that Richards had failed to exhaust available grievance procedures as required by the PLRA. The parties agree that the exhaustion and First Amendment issues are intertwined, because both depend on whether Perttu did in fact destroy Richards’s grievances and retaliate against him. The question presented iswhether a party has a right to a jury trial on PLRA exhaustion when that dispute is intertwined with the merits of the underlying suit….
If Congress had expressly provided in the PLRA that exhaustion disputes must be resolved by judges, then we would have been required to consider today whether such a provision violates the Seventh Amendment. But it is a “cardinal principle” that we not address such a constitutional question unless necessary. Tull v. United States, 481 U.S. 412, 417, n. 3 (1987). Meanwhile, as we have shown, the usual practice of the federal courts in cases of intertwinement is to send common issues to the jury. Because nothing in the PLRA suggests Congress intended to depart from that practice here, we hold that parties are entitled to a jury trial on PLRA exhaustion when that issue is intertwined with the merits of a claim protected by the Seventh Amendment.
The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is affirmed.
Justice Barrett authored a dissent almost as long as the Court’s opinion, and was joined by Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh. It begins this way:
The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA) requires prisoners suing under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to first exhaust the administrative remedies that are “available” to them. § 1997e(a). In the decision below, the Sixth Circuit held that even if prisoners are not ordinarily entitled to a jury trial to resolve this threshold question, the Seventh Amendment requires a jury when exhaustion is intertwined with the merits. I would reverse. The jury right conferred by the Seventh Amendment does not depend on the degree of factual overlap between a threshold issue and the merits of the plaintiff ’s claim.
The Court takes a different path. Instead of resolving the constitutional question that the parties brought to us, the Court holds that the PLRA itself requires a jury trial whenever an issue is common to exhaustion and the merits. No matter, the Court says, that the PLRA is silent on the subject. No matter that this statutory argument was not briefed before us. And no matter that it was not passed on by the courts below.
Having taken this detour, the Court ends up in the wrong place. Reading the PLRA’s silence to implicitly confer a right to a jury trial contravenes not only basic principles of statutory interpretation, but also several of this Court’s precedents. I respectfully dissent.