Trial News

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that prisoners are entitled to a jury trial on whether they properly exhausted administrative remedies under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) when the facts surrounding exhaustion are closely intertwined with the merits of their underlying constitutional claims. (Perttu v. Richards, No. 23-1324 (U.S. June 18, 2025).)

Michigan state prisoner Kyle Richards filed a §1983 suit against prison employee Thomas Perttu, alleging that Perttu sexually harassed him and other inmates and then retaliated against him for attempting to report the abuse through official channels. The plaintiff asserted that the defendant destroyed his grievance forms and threatened him with further retaliation. Richards claimed his constitutional rights were violated, including his First Amendment right to file grievances.

Perttu moved for summary judgment, arguing that the plaintiff’s claims were barred under the PLRA because he failed to exhaust the grievance process. The statute requires that incarcerated individuals must exhaust available prison grievance procedures before suing in federal court over prison conditions. The magistrate judge acknowledged a factual dispute over whether Perttu’s alleged interference excused exhaustion but held an evidentiary hearing and found Richards’s witnesses not credible. The district court adopted that finding and dismissed the case.

The Sixth Circuit reversed. While the court agreed that judges ordinarily may resolve disputes over PLRA exhaustion, it held that the Seventh Amendment guarantees a jury trial where the exhaustion issue overlaps with the merits of the plaintiff’s legal claims. The court emphasized that both Richards’s exhaustion defense and his retaliation claim turned on whether Perttu interfered with his access to the grievance process. That overlap, it reasoned, entitled Richards to a jury trial. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a conflict between the Sixth and Seventh Circuits on this issue.

In a decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court concluded that under established federal practice, parties are entitled to a jury trial on affirmative defenses that hinge on the same factual issues as the legal claims to be tried. Citing Beacon Theatres, Inc. v. Westover, 359 U.S. 500 (1959), the Court said, “Factual disputes regarding legal claims go to the jury, even if that means a judge must let a jury decide questions he could ordinarily resolve on his own.”

Because the PLRA is silent on whether exhaustion should be resolved by judges or juries, the Court applied the “usual practice” under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. That practice preserves the right to a jury trial in situations where the resolution of preliminary or threshold issues—such as exhaustion—may also decide the underlying legal claims.

The Court emphasized that this principle extends beyond equitable-versus-legal claims and has been applied to subject matter jurisdiction and other threshold doctrines when they involve disputed facts intertwined with the merits. Here, both parties agreed that the central factual question—whether Perttu interfered with the grievance process—bore directly on both exhaustion and the First Amendment retaliation claim.

Perttu argued that the jury trial right did not apply because judicial findings on exhaustion do not have preclusive effect in later proceedings and because the PLRA aims to conserve judicial resources. The Court rejected both arguments, stating that the dismissal of a claim altogether—not just estoppel—implicates the plaintiff’s trial rights. And while conserving judicial resources is a valid goal, the Court noted that “nothing in the PLRA suggests Congress intended to override the usual federal court practice of letting juries resolve intertwined factual disputes.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented, joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh. She argued that exhaustion is a threshold issue akin to jurisdiction, which courts routinely resolve without a jury, even when the facts overlap with the merits.

Plaintiff attorney Monier Abusaft of Spartanburg, S.C., who has extensive experience handling prisoners’ rights cases, said, “The PLRA has long been a sword used against prisoners who are attempting to vindicate their rights instead of a shield against frivolous litigation as Congress intended. It is a positive sign that the Supreme Court has preserved the right of a jury to decide issues of fact affecting a prisoner's substantive case even when claims of failure to exhaust administrative remedies are made by the government.”