Supreme Court gives one to the inmates

The Prison Litigation Reform Act was enacted in 1995 to make it harder for inmates to bring lawsuits against their jailers. They can still sue, but they have to file internal grievances first with the jail, even if they know the grievance will be denied. Once those grievances are resolved, the inmates then bring the lawsuit. Nearly 30 years later, the courts are still untangling the PLRA's language. In this case, the Supreme Court determines when the inmate is entitled to a jury trial when the jail disputes whether the inmate properly filed an internal grievance.

The case is Perttu v. Richards, issued on June 18. Of course, if the inmate does not bother to file a grievance, there is no lawsuit. It gets trickier if the correction officer denies the inmate a chance to file a grievance. The inmate can tell the court that he did not file the grievance because the CO denied him the grievance form, or that he filed one but someone at the jail threw it in the garbage pail. 

For years, the courts have grappled with how to proceed when the inmate says the jail interfered with or obstructed the grievance process. Many courts would hold an evidentiary hearing on this issue: the inmate would testify that the CO obstructed the process, and the CO would denial any such maneuver. The trial judge would decide who was telling the truth.

Here, plaintiff says the CO had sexually assaulted him. The defendants argue that plaintiff did not exhaust his administrative remedies in failing to properly file the grievance. The issue of whether the plaintiff filed the grievance is intertwined with the merits of his case, brought under the First Amendment, as plaintiff argued that he suffered retaliation for filing the grievance. The grievance itself is protected activity under the First Amendment. 

The Court holds that, as a matter of statutory interpretation, inmates "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," which provides for jury trials in civil actions brought under the Constitution. The PLRA does not speak to issue, as most federal statutes do not address many of the issues that wind up in the courts, eventually the Supreme Court. When the PLRA was enacted in 1995, "it was well established that when a factual dispute is intertwined with the merits of a claim that falls under the Seventh Amendment, that dispute should go to the jury, even if that requires judges to defer to determinations they would ordinarily make on their own." The PLRA's silence on this issue suggests that Congress intended that this practice apply in cases like this.

It may be better for inmates to have this issue resolved by the jury and not a stuffy judge. If the case is filed in a liberal jurisdiction, the jury may find the inmate credible upon his testimony that the jailer obstructed the grievance process. Anyway, since Chief Justice Roberts writes for the majority, which includes Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch and Jackson, four justices dissent. Justice Barrett writes that "the jury-trial right conferred by the Seventh Amendment does not turn on the degree of factual overlap between a threshold question and the merits of the plaintiff's claim."