A divided Supreme Court ruled on June 18 that a prisoner retains a right to a jury trial when there is a factual dispute over whether he fully exhausted prison grievance procedures before filing a lawsuit.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Perttu v. Richards. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the opinion authored by Roberts.
The respondent, Kyle Brandon Richards, is a prisoner in Michigan who alleges he was sexually abused by the petitioner, Thomas Perttu, an employee of the state prison.
Richards claims that when he attempted to file grievance forms regarding the alleged abuse, Perttu “destroyed them and threatened to kill him if he filed more,” the opinion stated.
Richards is a parolee who was taken back into custody for an alleged parole violation, the petition filed by Perttu in June 2024 states. Court papers do not indicate what crimes Richards was convicted of committing.
Richards filed a lawsuit against Perttu claiming that his constitutional rights, including his First Amendment-based right to file grievances, were violated. Perttu responded by saying Richards had not exhausted all available grievance procedures outlined by the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), according to the opinion.
The exhaustion doctrine holds that a plaintiff must exhaust all possible administrative remedies before seeking judicial review.
Both sides agree that the exhaustion and First Amendment issues are intertwined because both are dependent on whether Perttu destroyed the grievances and retaliated against Richards. The issue for the Supreme Court to decide was whether someone has a right to a trial by jury on PLRA exhaustion grounds “when that dispute is intertwined with the merits of the underlying suit,” the opinion said.
While the PLRA requires that available prison grievance procedures be exhausted before a lawsuit can be filed in federal court, there is an exception when a prison administrator “threaten[s] individual inmates so as to prevent their use of otherwise proper procedures,” as the Supreme Court ruled in Woodford v. Ngo (2006), the opinion said.
Perttu filed to summarily dismiss the lawsuit, presenting an affidavit from a prison grievance coordinator stating that no record existed of Richards’s grievance filings.
A federal magistrate judge held that there was “a genuine issue of fact as to whether [Richards and his co-litigants] were excused from properly exhausting their claims due to interference by Perttu” and that an evidentiary hearing should be held on the matter, the opinion stated.
Magistrate judges are appointed to assist federal district judges. The magistrate judge held the hearing in November 2021.
The judge found that Richards’s witnesses “lacked credibility” and recommended that the district court dismiss the case, which it did.
Richards appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He argued that resolving the exhaustion issue through a bench trial—conducted by a judge without a jury—is “not permissible where it would essentially be resolving a claim itself,” the opinion said.
Following circuit precedent, the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor of Richards in March 2024, finding that the Seventh Amendment requires a jury trial “when the resolution of the exhaustion issue under the PLRA would also resolve a genuine dispute of material fact regarding the merits of the plaintiff’s substantive case,” the opinion said.
The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in federal civil suits in which the value in dispute is more than $20.
The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Sixth Circuit.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett filed a dissenting opinion, which Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh joined.
The Sixth Circuit held that even if prisoners are not usually entitled to a jury trial to resolve the “threshold question” of PLRA exhaustion, the Seventh Amendment “requires a jury when exhaustion is intertwined with the merits,” Barrett wrote.
The justice wrote she would reverse the circuit court decision because the jury right protected 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.”
Instead of considering the constitutional question before the court, the majority held that the PLRA requires a jury trial “whenever an issue is common to exhaustion and the merits.” The majority interpreted the PLRA as conferring by implication a right to a jury trial, which violates statutory interpretation principles and several Supreme Court precedents, Barrett wrote.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 19, 2025, in The Epoch Times.