The 5-4 decision in Perttu v. Richards expands access to the courts for incarcerated people and clarifies the role of juries in determining whether an incarcerated person or persons have satisfied a particular prison's internal grievance process before filing a civil rights lawsuit, a requirement called "exhaustion" mandated by the Prison Litigation Reform Act, or PLRA.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, emphasized that PLRA exhaustion is an affirmative defense, subject to the usual rules of civil procedure that send intertwined factual disputes to a jury.
The ruling affirms a decision by the Sixth Circuit holding that a Michigan prisoner who sued a prison official on allegations of sexual abuse and retaliation had a right to a jury to decide his exhaustion matters, and it is expected to impact how courts handle prisoner lawsuits nationwide.
"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," Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
Congress adopted the Prison Litigation Reform Act in 1996 to curb what it saw as an excessive volume of meritless prison lawsuits, many of them filed by pro se litigants.
The statute mandates that incarcerated individuals must first pursue all available grievance procedures within the prison system, referred to as "administrative remedies," before they are allowed to file a civil rights claim in federal court. Access to the courts is only permitted once this internal process has been fully completed.
Wednesday's decision resolves a circuit split. The court sided with the Second, Fifth and Seventh circuits, which have allowed juries to decide exhaustion questions, and rejected a rule used by the Tenth Circuit that has allowed trial judges to rule on exhaustion as a threshold issue.
In the majority opinion, Justice Roberts wrote that "factual disputes regarding the merits of a legal claim go to the jury, even if that means a judge must let a jury decide questions he could ordinarily decide on his own."
Justice Amy Coney Barrett penned a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, criticizing the majority for reading a jury trial right in the PLRA "through its silence."
"The court ends up in the wrong place," Justice Barrett wrote. "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."
Kyle Richards, along with fellow inmates Kenneth Pruitt and Robert Kissee, filed a pro se civil rights lawsuit in April 2020 accusing correctional officer Thomas Perttu of sexually abusing at least a dozen men at Michigan's Baraga Correctional Facility. Richards also accused Perttu of violating his constitutional rights, including his First Amendment right to file grievances.
The men said they tried to report the alleged assaults through the prison's grievance system, but claimed Perttu retaliated against them and destroyed their grievance forms, effectively blocking their ability to seek redress.
"This is our last resort in an attempt to stop a vicious sexual predator from continuing his preying on vulnerable helpless inmates," the prisoners said in their handwritten complaint. "We file this action at risk to our lives and safety."
A magistrate judge ruled in December 2021 that Richards had failed to exhaust available administrative remedies, and the district court adopted that finding, dismissing the case without prejudice.
But in March 2024, the Sixth Circuit revived the lawsuit, finding that the exhaustion dispute was so entangled with the core retaliation claims that a jury, rather than a judge, must decide the facts.
A divided Supreme Court bench heard oral arguments in the case on Feb. 25. Justices Gorsuch, Kagan and Sotomayor pointedly questioned the idea that exhaustion should be exclusively decided by a judge.
Justice Alito, on the other hand, appeared more receptive to the state's argument that exhaustion is a threshold issue judges must resolve.
In the majority opinion issued Wednesday, Justice Roberts wrote that the parties in the dispute agreed that the exhaustion and First Amendment issues are intertwined, "because both depend on whether Perttu did in fact destroy Richards' grievances and retaliate against him."
Justice Roberts acknowledged in the majority opinion that, ordinarily, judges resolve equitable claims — legal actions that seek a court order for a specific action, for instance, an injunction — while juries resolve legal claims, which usually focus on monetary damages for past harm.
But in the gray area where these intersect, the chief justice wrote, the Supreme Court has sought to prioritize preserving the right to a jury trial. He cited the 1959 Supreme Court decision in Beacon Theatres Inc. v. Westover
, involving an antitrust dispute between two movie theater companies, to support the court's decision in Perttu.Begging to differ, Justice Barrett said her colleagues misused the Beacon Theatres precedent, pointing out that Perttu's case involves statutory interpretation — whether Congress conferred a jury trial right on prisoners when it enacted the PLRA — rather than the interplay between legal and equitable claims.
The dissenting justices also warned that the decision will make litigation under the PLRA more complex and burdensome.
"Now, any prisoner can potentially obtain full jury review of the very threshold question that was designed to streamline prisoner litigation. All he has to do is find a way to transform his inability to use the prison system into a claim for relief," Justice Barrett wrote. "Congress did not devise such a rule, and we have never adopted one."
Richards is represented by Lori Alvino McGill of the University of Virginia School of Law.
Perttu is represented by Ann Maurine Sherman of the Michigan Department of Attorney General.
The case is Perttu v. Richards, case number 23-1324, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
--Editing by Michael Watanabe.
Update: This article has been updated with more details from the decision and the dissent.
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