CONSTITUTIONAL LAW – SEVENTH AMENDMENT – RIGHT TO JURY TRIAL – PRISON

Perttu v. Richards, 605 U.S. (June 18, 2025) Roberts, C.J.
Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court.
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 is whether a party has a right to a jury trial on PLRA exhaustion when that dispute is intertwined with the merits of the underlying suit.
We hold as a matter of statutory interpretation that parties have a right to a jury trial on PLRA exhaustion when that issue is intertwined with the merits of a claim that falls under the Seventh Amendment. In light of this holding, we express no view today on whether Congress could have required otherwise in the PLRA without violating a party’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. See Byrd v. Blue Ridge Rural Elec. Cooperative, Inc., 356 U.S. 525, 537, and n. 10 (1958) (holding that affirmative defense should go to jury due to “the manner in which [the federal system] distributes trial functions between judge and jury,” making it “unnecessary” to consider “the constitutional question”).
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, with whom Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, and Justice Kavanaugh join, dissenting.