Legal Docket: When prisoners have grievances

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 24th day of March, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

On Friday, Trump administration lawyers came before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in a hearing. The issue was whether to extend a temporary block of deportations of what the White House calls Venezuelan gang members.

The judge and leading Democrats are highly critical of the president’s policies … and his zeal in pursuing them. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer:

SCHUMER: Donald Trump shows that he wishes to violate the laws in many, many different ways.

Judge Boasberg criticized President Trump’s lawyers as “intemperate and disrespectful” and possibly in violation of his orders. Additionally, he called the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportations legally unfounded.

EICHER: Tensions rose further as Judge Boasberg accused the government of possibly violating his order last weekend when the administration flew 238 men to a supermax prison in El Salvador. Government attorneys have until tomorrow to make a convincing argument that the administration did not violate his order.

Against this backdrop, the administration is blasting the judge, accusing him of substituting his judgment for an elected president keeping a campaign promise. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

LEAVITT: They are trying to dictate policy from the president of the United States. They are trying to clearly slow-walk this administration’s agenda, and it’s unacceptable.

Trump himself has laid into the judge. This is from an interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News:

TRUMP: He’s radical left. He was Obama appointed. And he actually said we shouldn't be able to take criminals, killers, murderers, horrible, the worst people, gang members, gang leaders, that we shouldn't be allowed to take them out of our country.

The Trump administration says it is considering invoking “state-secrets privilege” using a national-security rationale to avoid disclosing details about the deportation flights. A sworn statement from a Justice Department attorney confirmed that Cabinet-level talks were ongoing about invoking the privilege.

REICHARD: But Judge Boasberg has called that “woefully insufficient” and has said tomorrow’s hearing is where the administration will have to present its argument on state secrets. That’s in addition to its explanation why the White House believes it did not violate the order.

Amid the back and forth, and even the suggestion that the judge should face impeachment for overstepping his authority, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement. The chief wrote that legal disagreements are handled in the usual appeals process, not through impeachment.

EICHER: Now let’s jump into our case for today, the U.S. Supreme Court hearing argument in a dispute between a prison and a prisoner:

ROBERTS: We’ll hear argument next in Case 23-1324, Perttu versus Richards.

Richards, the prisoner; Perttu, an officer at the prison.

Kyle Richards used the prison grievance system to make claims against officer Thomas Perttu. He says Perttu harassed and intimidated him, and then retaliated when Richards filed complaints. He says Perttu destroyed the paperwork and even threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop filing grievances. But that grievance process is critical. Federal law requires all inmates to go through a prison’s grievance process before they can sue in court.

REICHARD: In the law, that’s known as exhausting administrative remedies. It’s been a federal requirement for almost 30 years, after Congress passed a measure aimed at preventing the abuse of the legal system by prisoners. Then-President Bill Clinton signed the Prison Litigation Reform Act in 1996.

The National Sheriffs’ Association filed a friend of the court brief in support of the prison. Greg Champagne served as its past president and is now sheriff of St. Charles Parish in Louisiana. I called him up to understand the background:

CHAMPAGNE: So the courts were actually pleading for mercy to Congress. It wasn't so much sheriffs, because what's happening as you know, you know, inmates have a lot of time on their hands, and there's some inmates that, you know, they love just filing lawsuits. And prior to that time, some of them, that's all they do. They love just putting a monkey wrench into the system and just filing suit after suit over issues like, you know, breakfast was cold. Some ridiculous things. And the federal courts, when they get those things, they have to dedicate, you know, a law clerk to it, a judge has to look at it. They can't just throw it away. I think the largest part of their dockets was really nuisance inmate lawsuits. So it was actually the courts who were asking for some relief from that.

EICHER: Sheriff Champagne says judges are well suited to decide the factual question in this instance:

CHAMPAGNE: I mean, why can't the federal judge, when he gets it look at it,  have an evidentiary hearing, which is what the Fifth Circuit to at least two other circuits do. And they can say, you know, call the warden and say, Hey, did you tear up the grievance? What happened here? You know, and they can make that determination. You don't need a jury to do that. Those are expensive. It's time consuming. Clogs up the federal court system.

REICHARD: At the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan pushed back on the argument that the judge ought to decide the matter and not the jury:

KAGAN: I think if, like the warden tears up your grievance papers, somebody is going to say that the exhaustion process wasn’t available. And so then I think that the question is, OK, when that is the fact, that’s the crucial fact, it should be the jury that decides that question, shouldn’t it?

But Michigan’s Solicitor General Ann Sherman countered this is a threshold question, and judges can handle it.

EICHER: Lorie McGill, the lawyer for the prisoner, pointed to what happens when prison officials sabotage the grievance procedures. That renders the grievance process unavailable. Shouldn't a jury to decide that then.

REICHARD: But Justice Samuel Alito echoed the same worries the Prison Litigation Reform Act meant to stop:

ALITO: Suppose you have a prisoner who's serving a lengthy prison sentence and files a grievance, and the state says: Well, you didn't exhaust. So the prisoner says: Well, yeah, I did exhaust. I put I the grievance in the box or I handed it to a guard. So, at a minimum, he gets a trip to the courthouse. He gets a trip out of the prison.

MCGILL: Well, in our client’s case, everything was…

ALITO: I’m not talking about your client. I’m talking about other prisoners who may want to take advantage of this. So then there's a genuine dispute of material fact about whether he, you know, is he telling the truth? Is he not telling the truth?

EICHER: Inmate Richards has support from unexpected allies. The ACLU on the left and the Cato Institute on the right, both of them filed friend of the court briefs in his favor.

REICHARD: I called up Cato’s Mike Fox to explain the federal law as he sees it:

FOX: What it's in effect done is make it very, very difficult for people to actually bring claims forward. And of course, you know, the framers intended juries of ordinary citizens to be adjudicators of disputes between citizens and their government. And when a prisoner has a grievance with the correctional facility that they’re in, they are as a matter of constitutional law as a matter of the Seventh Amendment entitled to a jury trial.

But what of the concerns about frivolous lawsuits clogging up the system?

FOX: One person's constitutional rights are not contingent upon someone else potentially abusing the system. ... And while you do forfeit certain rights when you're incarcerated, you don't forfeit all of them. ... And by the way, if they did have a meritless claim and it got in front of a jury, the jury will see it for what it is.

Sherman for the prison warned that a win for Richards would defeat the whole purpose of the Prison Litigation Reform Act and again open the floodgates of massive litigation.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed to be spoiling for a fight by going outside the record before the court:

SOTOMAYOR: And I've gone back 12 years and had our library and my clerks search Second Circuit opinions, and in those 12 years, only five cases has there been litigation over whether or not there was exhaustion because only five cases was it interwound with the merits. I don't see where the floodgates have come up.

EICHER: But this case is not the 2nd Circuit, it’s the 5th. And it’s 2025, not nearly 30 years ago when Congress updated the law. So the question remains: Is exhaustion a procedural step for judges? Or is it a fundamental question of fairness that belongs to a jury? We’ll know most likely by the end of June.

REICHARD: Finally, the justices handed down two opinions on Friday.

The Court unanimously ruled in favor of Patrick Daley Thompson, former Chicago alderman and member of the Daley family. He’d been indicted for making allegedly false statements to the government about bank loans.

The issue was whether a federal law criminalizing false statements applies to misleading but technically true statements. The justices held that the law requires statements to be outright false, not just misleading.

So Thompson returns to lower court to reconsider his conviction in light of this narrower interpretation of the law.

EICHER: And that second decision, the court ruled 7-2 against a former associate of the Genovese crime family—Salvatore Delligatti, better known by the mob nickname “Fat Sal.” He’d given a loaded gun to others to kill a suspected informant. He was charged under a law that mandates extra prison time for using a gun during a violent crime. Delligatti tried making the case that supplying a gun isn’t the violent crime, it’s the act of shooting someone to death that is the violence. But the Supreme Court rejected the argument and said Delligatti’s action still involves the use of physical force.

So, lower court is affirmed and Fat Sal stays in prison, including extra time for use of a gun during a crime of violence.

REICHARD: And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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